Walker demonizes unions, the poor and voters of color in order to appeal to whites.

Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s drive for an anti-labor “right to work” law covering private-sector workers is deeply rooted in the racism of the Deep South’s former slaveholding states.

They are yet more evidence that he is following a template known as the Republican Party’s “Southern strategy,” which plays to white voters’ racial resentment, even though his budding presidential campaign is based in snow-encrusted Wisconsin.

This emerging strategy is reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s original “Southern strategy” of 1968 and Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign kickoff event. Reagan started his campaign by championing state's rights in Neshoba County in Mississippi, a site whose only national symbolic significance was serving as the site of the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers.

Many progressive commentators have asserted that major demographic shifts among Latinos and the young have utterly closed off the road to the White House for any GOP candidate. But Thomas B. Edsall cautioned that a different scenario could emerge.

“If the Republicans can downplay overt racial animus at an overt level while subliminally signifying their lack of sympathy for people of color, they can potentially build a durable coalition of whites,” he wrote. “The trick for Republicans in their quest to maintain white majoritarian hegemony is to allow this fusion of issues [racial fears and resentment, economic instability, social conservatism] to do its mobilizing work at a subliminal level, without triggering widespread resistance to explicit manifestations of bias and race prejudice.”

Walker’s emerging presidential campaign appears to be following this scenario. It is remarkably close to the approach Walker has long used in racially polarized Milwaukee, where he began his political career, and can increasingly be seen in his record as governor.

Here are five examples of the way Walker plays the race card.

1. Riding an anti-union law rooted deeply in racism.

This week, Wisconsin’s GOP-controlled legislature took up so-called “right to work” legislation, which would ban unions from requiring all employees to pay dues. While Walker is promoting the “right to work” in the name of “free choice,” this anti-union movement has explicitly racist roots in the Deep South, where the purpose of the original right-to-work laws was precisely to deny free choice to workers who want unions to help them escape misery-level wages and tyrannical control.

“Right-to-work” laws have a clear purpose: to divide workers and undermine and destroy unions. Right to work incentivizes management to hire anti-union employees, and discourages union membership or even payment of fees for the services unions provide to workers. The outcome in a state like Mississippi is that only 3.7 percent of workers are union members.

The legacy of “right to work” laws reaches back to the 1930s, when white supremacists like oil lobbyist Vance Muse initially pioneered the concept to divide and eliminate unions. Muse formed the Christian American Alliance to spread the combined gospel of racism and anti-unionism, pushing the “right-to-work” notion and developing alliances with like-minded groups including the Ku Klux Klan. Muse concluded that the only solution for maintaining segregation was to make union membership or any payment of union dues or fees voluntary. Without such laws, whites would be “forced” to mingle with blacks, although there had been many interracial unions over previous decades.

Crude as it was, Muse’s segregationist argument intersected perfectly with the mentality of corporate managers committed to holding down wages. They recognized that Muse’s “right-to-work” concept would serve to break up unified worker efforts to claim therights granted under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. Some major corporations directly fused the segregationist and anti-union appeals. As late as 1944, wrote Diane McWhorter in her book Carry Me Home, “U.S. Steel set up a League to Maintain White Supremacy to spread ‘the white supremacy gospel of Simpson [Jim Simpson, an anti-New Deal politician in Alabama] among the grassroots (that is, its workforce)… to baldly promote racial strife."

But over time, employers increasing dropped their overtly racist pitch and sold “right-to-work” in terms of individual rights and the phantom threat of “compulsory unionism” (no one can be forced to join, but can be expected to pay fees for the costs of union representation). The laws spread slowly from the Deep South over the past eight decades to encompass 24 states, with Wisconsin likely becoming the symbolically important 25th state. This milestone will be seen as a major accomplishment in the eyes of the Republican conservatives Walker is cultivating. It also adds to Walker’s credentials at this past weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

If the Wisconsin "right-to-work" bill passes the Assembly (after clearing the Senate Wednesday on a 17-15 vote), the primary victims will be low-paid black and Latino workers who have been unable to raise their low wages in fast-food and big-box stores like Walmart despite visible protests. These minority workers have shown a decisive interest in unionizing and have been long targeted by right-wingers.

Conservatives, including the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation—America’s largest right-wing foundation—have spent decades demonizing unions, public employees and government programs as unnecessary, and social welfare recipients as undeserving opportunists. Their rhetoric raises the specter of an ever-growing class of welfare dependents, who are often hinted to be mainly dark-skinned and draining the tax dollars of hard-working Americans.

Walker used this same line of attack and rhetoric as he has moved to eliminate almost all union bargaining rights through the passage of Act 10 in 2011 and now to weaken union membership further through "right-to-work" legislation. While Wisconsin was still reeling from the economic insecurity generated by the Great Recession during Walker's tenure as governor, he has blamed supposedly over-paid public employees for the economic anxieties experienced by other Wisconsinites.

The Bradley Foundation has over $800 million in assets and is guided by racial attitudes similar to those of the John Birch Society members who started the foundation. It has funded “academic” research by figures like Charles Murray, who contended poverty was intractable because of welfare programs—with minorities widely perceived as the recipients—and the supposed dependence and moral flaws that were encouraged. Most notoriously, Bradley also spent about $1 million publishing and promoting the 1994 book The Bell Curve by Murray and John Hernnstein, which argued for the inherent intellectual inferiority of African Americans and Latinos. The book garnered a surprising amount of respectable media responses, despite its weak “scientific” basis and white supremacist implications.

Walker’s political activities have been closely interwoven with the foundation. Its president Michael Grebe, the former state GOP party chair, has served as his campaign chair. Its sizeable public-relations resources have also helped give Walker national attention, and Bradley-funded think tanks and advocacy groups actively push Walker’s agenda—and vice-versa. Undoubtedly, the foundation’s contacts have opened doors to conservative donors. But on policy, Walker’s tight relationship with the foundation has aligned him with powerful forces that continually seek to prove that government programs aiding the poor are hopeless.

3. Making black/brown majority Milwaukee his foil.

This disregard for the poor can be seen throughout Walker's career, as state legislator, Milwaukee County executive and governor. Starting in Milwaukee, Walker consistently neglected the plight of the poor. While the city has a population that is about 40 percent black and 17 percent Latino, Walker has relentlessly fought to downsize public institutions poor residents depend on.

“As Milwaukee County executive for eight years, he presided over the decline of once-exemplary transit and park systems,” observed John Gurda, the author of numerous works on Milwaukee history. “As Wisconsin's governor since 2010, Walker worked with the Republican Legislature to make the deepest cuts to public education in state history—cuts that Milwaukee, Wisconsin's largest and poorest public school system, felt disproportionately.” Walker’s latest state budget proposals reflect the same mindset.

Many observers argue his policies have only exacerbated the city’s social misery and decline. He has portrayed Milwaukee’s poverty as the result of failed public safety-net institutions, rather than its abandonment by corporations that closed shop seeking higher profits in southern states or exporting jobs to lower-wage Mexico and China. During his gubernatorial recall election in 2012, he said, “We don't want Wisconsin to become like Milwaukee.”

In reality, Milwaukee has experienced a rapid decline from a relatively prosperous middle-class city into the nation's fourth poorest because of drastic deindustrialization and many corporations moving out-of-state or overseas. Milwaukee has lost over 80 percent of its industrial base since 1977. The destruction of family-sustaining job opportunities has driven down wages and created widespread unemployment that has devastated African-American workers.

Milwaukee was once dubbed the "Star of the Snowbelt” by the Wall Street Journal because of its initial success in retaining jobs and was long known as the “machine tool capital of the world” because of its uniquely skilled workforce. But it has been on a decades-long slide as wages have been dragged down by right-to-work states, as well as by Mexico and China. “In 1970, median African-American family income was 19 percent above the national black average; 30 years later, it was 23 percent lower,” Richard Longworth noted in Caught in the Middle.

It is telling that Walker’s lone initiative for injecting money into Milwaukee is a measure pushed by the city’s business elite: providing $220 million in state bonds for a new arena for the Bucks NBA basketball team, owned by three billionaires.

4. Replacing the poll tax with voter ID and redistricting.

Walker and his allies have strenuously worked to police and restrict voting, with measures that will make it much more difficult for African Americans and Latinos to vote and via partisan redistricting, which redraws district lines to intentionally dilute Democratic strongholds.

Walker’s bill restricting voter rights came almost immediately after the Occupy-style labor revolt against his push to crush public-sector unions. Frances Fox Piven, author of many books on voting rights and social movements, told me, “We saw labor protests of unprecedented size and intensity over limiting their voice as workers. And then [protesters] were greeted with a law to limit their power electorally, too.”

Walker sees his electoral chicanery as one of his significant accomplishments. At this winter’s Iowa Freedom Summit for prospective 2016 presidential candidates, Walker boasted to right-wingers that he had signed voter ID law in 2011—although it has been used just for one small-scale election and now hangs in legal limbo. The state’s Common Cause chapter called it “the most restrictive, blatantly partisan and ill-conceived voter identification legislation in the nation.”

The law would effectively disenfranchise large numbers of African American, Latino, poor elderly, and college students who lack the required state-issued voter IDs to get a ballot. One Wisconsin study showed that requiring a state-issued ID like a driver’s license would have a high impact on African Americans, Latinos and the elderly, saying, “Among black males between ages 18 and 24, 78 percent lacked a driver’s license.”

The law also requires longer residency requirements to be eligible to vote, and cuts back on early voting options in Milwaukee, which has been highly popular among black churches and organizations as a central means of encouraging voter turnout.

Walker’s Republican allies also diluted the voice of poor and working-class voters, especially minorities in the state’s industrial cities through a secretively crafted redistricting plan that put Democratic-leaning voters into smaller number of districts. In 2012, the Democrats won 174,000 more votes than the Republicans in Wisconsin legislative races, yet the electorate wound up with an overwhelming 60-39 Republican majority in the Assembly. The Republicans won 46 percent of the vote, but due to the newly drawn districts that translated into 61 percent of the seats.

5. Walker has a history of race-baiting.

In one revealing episode of the 2012 recall campaign, Walker put up a TV ad reminiscent of the Republican Party’s ugly race-baiting politics many believed had been consigned to the past. “Walker ran an ad charging [his opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom] Barrett with covering up violence in Milwaukee featuring an image of a brutalized toddler—a Willie Horton–style spot one rarely sees in other parts of the country anymore,” recalled historian John Gurda, referring to the TV spot George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign used against Massachusetts’ Democratic Gov. and party nominee, Michael Dukakis.

Such race baiting is not new to Walker and his key supporters. Two influential right-wing radio talk-show hosts, Charlie Sykes and Mark Belling, have helped his climb in politics by putting him on the air often and applauding him. They are known for their frequent remarks about the purported moral deficiencies of blacks and Latinos, but have a vast following of suburban conservatives they can mobilize politically in a way no left-leaning media outlet has approached.

As former GOP legislator Scott Jensen remarked, “The listenership is just so much higher here [in the Milwaukee suburbs]. And the ability to get people to march in step when [the shows] are all hammering the same themes is extraordinary.”

Walker’s Extremist Right-Wing Base

Walker has also benefitted from relationships with other wealthy right-wingers, such as Wisconsin’s Diane Hendricks, Las Vegas gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson, and the Koch brothers. All have been central to Walker’s political success in Wisconsin and his emergence as a serious presidential contender for 2012 among Republican.

But Walker’s turn to "dog-whistle" politics, or the manipulation of whites’ racial resentments, is as noteworthy as it is notorious. It begins with an agenda that is hostile to government programs benefitting the poor and big government programs of any kind—except for those providing subsidies to corporations and the rich. However, there is a not-so-subtle subtext of pro-white racism.

There are many dots that connect this ugly picture: Walker’s war against labor and support for “right-to-work” laws despite their racist legacy and present-day impacts; his willingness to use Willie Horton-style ads which stoke white fears of blacks; his support for restricting the right of blacks and Latinos; his institutional ties to long-standing institution like the Bradley which are tacitly approving of white supremacy; his links to media personalities who thrive on feeding racism; and his policies punishing urban citizens, especially people of color.

Essentially, Walker embodies the lessons outlined by the late Lee Atwater, the ruthless Republican strategist. In a remarkably frank interview, Atwater once described the evolution of conservative politics and the “Southern strategy": “You start out in 1954 by saying, 'nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can’t say nigger—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites… .'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'nigger, nigger.'"

Walker, in governing Wisconsin and running for president, is showing himself to be a consummate practitioner of the Southern strategy long advocated by Atwater and warned about by the liberal Thomas Edsall. The overt racism is scrapped on the surface, but the core of the ever-congenial Walker’s policies is profoundly hostile to people of color and to social justice.

Walker demonizes unions, the poor and voters of color in order to appeal to whites.

Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s drive for an anti-labor “right to work” law covering private-sector workers is deeply rooted in the racism of the Deep South’s former slaveholding states.

They are yet more evidence that he is following a template known as the Republican Party’s “Southern strategy,” which plays to white voters’ racial resentment, even though his budding presidential campaign is based in snow-encrusted Wisconsin.

This emerging strategy is reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s original “Southern strategy” of 1968 and Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign kickoff event. Reagan started his campaign by championing state's rights in Neshoba County in Mississippi, a site whose only national symbolic significance was serving as the site of the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers.

Many progressive commentators have asserted that major demographic shifts among Latinos and the young have utterly closed off the road to the White House for any GOP candidate. But Thomas B. Edsall cautioned that a different scenario could emerge.

“If the Republicans can downplay overt racial animus at an overt level while subliminally signifying their lack of sympathy for people of color, they can potentially build a durable coalition of whites,” he wrote. “The trick for Republicans in their quest to maintain white majoritarian hegemony is to allow this fusion of issues [racial fears and resentment, economic instability, social conservatism] to do its mobilizing work at a subliminal level, without triggering widespread resistance to explicit manifestations of bias and race prejudice.”

Walker’s emerging presidential campaign appears to be following this scenario. It is remarkably close to the approach Walker has long used in racially polarized Milwaukee, where he began his political career, and can increasingly be seen in his record as governor.

Here are five examples of the way Walker plays the race card.

1. Riding an anti-union law rooted deeply in racism.

This week, Wisconsin’s GOP-controlled legislature took up so-called “right to work” legislation, which would ban unions from requiring all employees to pay dues. While Walker is promoting the “right to work” in the name of “free choice,” this anti-union movement has explicitly racist roots in the Deep South, where the purpose of the original right-to-work laws was precisely to deny free choice to workers who want unions to help them escape misery-level wages and tyrannical control.

“Right-to-work” laws have a clear purpose: to divide workers and undermine and destroy unions. Right to work incentivizes management to hire anti-union employees, and discourages union membership or even payment of fees for the services unions provide to workers. The outcome in a state like Mississippi is that only 3.7 percent of workers are union members.

The legacy of “right to work” laws reaches back to the 1930s, when white supremacists like oil lobbyist Vance Muse initially pioneered the concept to divide and eliminate unions. Muse formed the Christian American Alliance to spread the combined gospel of racism and anti-unionism, pushing the “right-to-work” notion and developing alliances with like-minded groups including the Ku Klux Klan. Muse concluded that the only solution for maintaining segregation was to make union membership or any payment of union dues or fees voluntary. Without such laws, whites would be “forced” to mingle with blacks, although there had been many interracial unions over previous decades.

Crude as it was, Muse’s segregationist argument intersected perfectly with the mentality of corporate managers committed to holding down wages. They recognized that Muse’s “right-to-work” concept would serve to break up unified worker efforts to claim therights granted under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. Some major corporations directly fused the segregationist and anti-union appeals. As late as 1944, wrote Diane McWhorter in her book Carry Me Home, “U.S. Steel set up a League to Maintain White Supremacy to spread ‘the white supremacy gospel of Simpson [Jim Simpson, an anti-New Deal politician in Alabama] among the grassroots (that is, its workforce)… to baldly promote racial strife."

But over time, employers increasing dropped their overtly racist pitch and sold “right-to-work” in terms of individual rights and the phantom threat of “compulsory unionism” (no one can be forced to join, but can be expected to pay fees for the costs of union representation). The laws spread slowly from the Deep South over the past eight decades to encompass 24 states, with Wisconsin likely becoming the symbolically important 25th state. This milestone will be seen as a major accomplishment in the eyes of the Republican conservatives Walker is cultivating. It also adds to Walker’s credentials at this past weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

If the Wisconsin "right-to-work" bill passes the Assembly (after clearing the Senate Wednesday on a 17-15 vote), the primary victims will be low-paid black and Latino workers who have been unable to raise their low wages in fast-food and big-box stores like Walmart despite visible protests. These minority workers have shown a decisive interest in unionizing and have been long targeted by right-wingers.

Conservatives, including the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation—America’s largest right-wing foundation—have spent decades demonizing unions, public employees and government programs as unnecessary, and social welfare recipients as undeserving opportunists. Their rhetoric raises the specter of an ever-growing class of welfare dependents, who are often hinted to be mainly dark-skinned and draining the tax dollars of hard-working Americans.

Walker used this same line of attack and rhetoric as he has moved to eliminate almost all union bargaining rights through the passage of Act 10 in 2011 and now to weaken union membership further through "right-to-work" legislation. While Wisconsin was still reeling from the economic insecurity generated by the Great Recession during Walker's tenure as governor, he has blamed supposedly over-paid public employees for the economic anxieties experienced by other Wisconsinites.

The Bradley Foundation has over $800 million in assets and is guided by racial attitudes similar to those of the John Birch Society members who started the foundation. It has funded “academic” research by figures like Charles Murray, who contended poverty was intractable because of welfare programs—with minorities widely perceived as the recipients—and the supposed dependence and moral flaws that were encouraged. Most notoriously, Bradley also spent about $1 million publishing and promoting the 1994 book The Bell Curve by Murray and John Hernnstein, which argued for the inherent intellectual inferiority of African Americans and Latinos. The book garnered a surprising amount of respectable media responses, despite its weak “scientific” basis and white supremacist implications.

Walker’s political activities have been closely interwoven with the foundation. Its president Michael Grebe, the former state GOP party chair, has served as his campaign chair. Its sizeable public-relations resources have also helped give Walker national attention, and Bradley-funded think tanks and advocacy groups actively push Walker’s agenda—and vice-versa. Undoubtedly, the foundation’s contacts have opened doors to conservative donors. But on policy, Walker’s tight relationship with the foundation has aligned him with powerful forces that continually seek to prove that government programs aiding the poor are hopeless.

3. Making black/brown majority Milwaukee his foil.

This disregard for the poor can be seen throughout Walker's career, as state legislator, Milwaukee County executive and governor. Starting in Milwaukee, Walker consistently neglected the plight of the poor. While the city has a population that is about 40 percent black and 17 percent Latino, Walker has relentlessly fought to downsize public institutions poor residents depend on.

“As Milwaukee County executive for eight years, he presided over the decline of once-exemplary transit and park systems,” observed John Gurda, the author of numerous works on Milwaukee history. “As Wisconsin's governor since 2010, Walker worked with the Republican Legislature to make the deepest cuts to public education in state history—cuts that Milwaukee, Wisconsin's largest and poorest public school system, felt disproportionately.” Walker’s latest state budget proposals reflect the same mindset.

Many observers argue his policies have only exacerbated the city’s social misery and decline. He has portrayed Milwaukee’s poverty as the result of failed public safety-net institutions, rather than its abandonment by corporations that closed shop seeking higher profits in southern states or exporting jobs to lower-wage Mexico and China. During his gubernatorial recall election in 2012, he said, “We don't want Wisconsin to become like Milwaukee.”

In reality, Milwaukee has experienced a rapid decline from a relatively prosperous middle-class city into the nation's fourth poorest because of drastic deindustrialization and many corporations moving out-of-state or overseas. Milwaukee has lost over 80 percent of its industrial base since 1977. The destruction of family-sustaining job opportunities has driven down wages and created widespread unemployment that has devastated African-American workers.

Milwaukee was once dubbed the "Star of the Snowbelt” by the Wall Street Journal because of its initial success in retaining jobs and was long known as the “machine tool capital of the world” because of its uniquely skilled workforce. But it has been on a decades-long slide as wages have been dragged down by right-to-work states, as well as by Mexico and China. “In 1970, median African-American family income was 19 percent above the national black average; 30 years later, it was 23 percent lower,” Richard Longworth noted in Caught in the Middle.

It is telling that Walker’s lone initiative for injecting money into Milwaukee is a measure pushed by the city’s business elite: providing $220 million in state bonds for a new arena for the Bucks NBA basketball team, owned by three billionaires.

4. Replacing the poll tax with voter ID and redistricting.

Walker and his allies have strenuously worked to police and restrict voting, with measures that will make it much more difficult for African Americans and Latinos to vote and via partisan redistricting, which redraws district lines to intentionally dilute Democratic strongholds.

Walker’s bill restricting voter rights came almost immediately after the Occupy-style labor revolt against his push to crush public-sector unions. Frances Fox Piven, author of many books on voting rights and social movements, told me, “We saw labor protests of unprecedented size and intensity over limiting their voice as workers. And then [protesters] were greeted with a law to limit their power electorally, too.”

Walker sees his electoral chicanery as one of his significant accomplishments. At this winter’s Iowa Freedom Summit for prospective 2016 presidential candidates, Walker boasted to right-wingers that he had signed voter ID law in 2011—although it has been used just for one small-scale election and now hangs in legal limbo. The state’s Common Cause chapter called it “the most restrictive, blatantly partisan and ill-conceived voter identification legislation in the nation.”

The law would effectively disenfranchise large numbers of African American, Latino, poor elderly, and college students who lack the required state-issued voter IDs to get a ballot. One Wisconsin study showed that requiring a state-issued ID like a driver’s license would have a high impact on African Americans, Latinos and the elderly, saying, “Among black males between ages 18 and 24, 78 percent lacked a driver’s license.”

The law also requires longer residency requirements to be eligible to vote, and cuts back on early voting options in Milwaukee, which has been highly popular among black churches and organizations as a central means of encouraging voter turnout.

Walker’s Republican allies also diluted the voice of poor and working-class voters, especially minorities in the state’s industrial cities through a secretively crafted redistricting plan that put Democratic-leaning voters into smaller number of districts. In 2012, the Democrats won 174,000 more votes than the Republicans in Wisconsin legislative races, yet the electorate wound up with an overwhelming 60-39 Republican majority in the Assembly. The Republicans won 46 percent of the vote, but due to the newly drawn districts that translated into 61 percent of the seats.

5. Walker has a history of race-baiting.

In one revealing episode of the 2012 recall campaign, Walker put up a TV ad reminiscent of the Republican Party’s ugly race-baiting politics many believed had been consigned to the past. “Walker ran an ad charging [his opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom] Barrett with covering up violence in Milwaukee featuring an image of a brutalized toddler—a Willie Horton–style spot one rarely sees in other parts of the country anymore,” recalled historian John Gurda, referring to the TV spot George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign used against Massachusetts’ Democratic Gov. and party nominee, Michael Dukakis.

Such race baiting is not new to Walker and his key supporters. Two influential right-wing radio talk-show hosts, Charlie Sykes and Mark Belling, have helped his climb in politics by putting him on the air often and applauding him. They are known for their frequent remarks about the purported moral deficiencies of blacks and Latinos, but have a vast following of suburban conservatives they can mobilize politically in a way no left-leaning media outlet has approached.

As former GOP legislator Scott Jensen remarked, “The listenership is just so much higher here [in the Milwaukee suburbs]. And the ability to get people to march in step when [the shows] are all hammering the same themes is extraordinary.”

Walker’s Extremist Right-Wing Base

Walker has also benefitted from relationships with other wealthy right-wingers, such as Wisconsin’s Diane Hendricks, Las Vegas gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson, and the Koch brothers. All have been central to Walker’s political success in Wisconsin and his emergence as a serious presidential contender for 2012 among Republican.

But Walker’s turn to "dog-whistle" politics, or the manipulation of whites’ racial resentments, is as noteworthy as it is notorious. It begins with an agenda that is hostile to government programs benefitting the poor and big government programs of any kind—except for those providing subsidies to corporations and the rich. However, there is a not-so-subtle subtext of pro-white racism.

There are many dots that connect this ugly picture: Walker’s war against labor and support for “right-to-work” laws despite their racist legacy and present-day impacts; his willingness to use Willie Horton-style ads which stoke white fears of blacks; his support for restricting the right of blacks and Latinos; his institutional ties to long-standing institution like the Bradley which are tacitly approving of white supremacy; his links to media personalities who thrive on feeding racism; and his policies punishing urban citizens, especially people of color.

Essentially, Walker embodies the lessons outlined by the late Lee Atwater, the ruthless Republican strategist. In a remarkably frank interview, Atwater once described the evolution of conservative politics and the “Southern strategy": “You start out in 1954 by saying, 'nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can’t say nigger—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites… .'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'nigger, nigger.'"

Walker, in governing Wisconsin and running for president, is showing himself to be a consummate practitioner of the Southern strategy long advocated by Atwater and warned about by the liberal Thomas Edsall. The overt racism is scrapped on the surface, but the core of the ever-congenial Walker’s policies is profoundly hostile to people of color and to social justice.

Comparing battles with unions to fighting terrorists, the cocky Wisconsin governor unites right and left in horror.

There are two entirely different ways to be horrified by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker comparing his battle with state unions to the fight against ISIS. If you haven’t heard, when he was asked how he’d combat the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq at the Conservative Political Action conference Thursday, he replied: “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.”

From the left, you can be disgusted by Walker comparing legal protests by labor unions and their supporters to the barbaric, blood-thirsty terrorism of ISIS. From the right, you can be appalled that Walker is clueless enough to suggest that standing up to peaceful protesters is remotely comparable to fighting a multi-national terror threat. Many people probably have both reactions; I know I did.

I’m not sure it’s enough to break the fever on the right that has delirious admirers seeing Walker as the 21st century Ronald Reagan. That might take a bigger dose of Walker idiocy – but it’s probably coming.

Once again, Walker’s hard-working communications staff had to clean up his mess with an emailed statement, just as they did last week after he said he didn’t know if President Obama is a Christian. Spokesperson Kristin Kukowski told reporters:

Governor Walker believes our fight against ISIS is one of the most important issues our country faces. He was in no way comparing any American citizen to ISIS. What the governor was saying was when faced with adversity he chooses strength and leadership. Those are the qualities we need to fix the leadership void this White House has created.

Walker himself tried denying that he’d compared Wisconsin protesters to ISIS. “You all will misconstrue things the way you see fit,” he whined to reporters after his speech, “but I think it’s pretty clear, that’s the closest thing I have in terms of handling a difficult situation, not that there’s any parallel between the two.”

It wasn’t just the stunning equation of peaceful protesters to ISIS that made Walker seem unready for the presidency during his CPAC speech. There he was, dead-eyed as usual, trying to claim that getting regular briefings from the FBI should count as foreign policy experience. He’s learned to punctuate his unremarkable remarks with a lame, Bill Clinton-style thumb-poke of faux-sincerity. It actually seemed sincere the first couple hundred times Clinton did it. Walker looks like he’s still practicing in front of a mirror. His light-blue shirt is baggy, his tie is too long, his hair is messy, not tousled; he looks like he’s running for Badger Boys State, not the presidency.

It turns out CPAC wasn’t the first time Walker has tried his “standing up to unions means I can whip ISIS” line. He made a similar argument at the New York event where Rudy Giuliani upstaged him by claiming President Obama doesn’t love America, according to Larry Kudlow, an event co-sponsor:

Walker argued that when Reagan fired the PATCO air-traffic controllers over their illegal strike, he was sending a message of toughness to Democrats and unions at home as well as our Soviet enemies abroad. Similarly, Walker believes his stance against unions in Wisconsin would be a signal of toughness to Islamic jihadists and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

If Kudlow is correct, that undermines Walker’s claim that he was merely citing the protests as an example of a “difficult situation” he’s faced. He thinks somehow ISIS in Iraq and Syria will be cowed by his battles on the steps of the Capitol in Madison.

That is a terrible response. First, taking on a bunch of protesters is not comparably difficult to taking on a Caliphate with sympathizers and terrorists around the globe, and saying so suggests Walker doesn’t quite understand the complexity of the challenge from ISIS and its allied groups.

Secondly, it is insulting to the protesters, a group I take no pleasure in defending. The protesters in Wisconsin, so furiously angry over Walker’s reforms and disruptive to the procedures of passing laws, earned plenty of legitimate criticism. But they’re not ISIS. They’re not beheading innocent people. They’re Americans, and as much as we may find their ideas, worldview, and perspective spectacularly wrongheaded, they don’t deserve to be compared to murderous terrorists.

I couldn’t put it better myself.

Walker is already complaining that this is another “gotcha” moment by the media, in the wake of those “gotcha” questions about whether Obama loves America or is truly a Christian as he publicly declares. As Digby reminds us, the Urban Dictionary aptly defines a “gotcha” question as one Sarah Palin is too dumb to answer.

Claiming fighting protesters prepared you to fight ISIS when asked about fighting terror? That’s an answer even Palin might have been too smart to give.

Comparing battles with unions to fighting terrorists, the cocky Wisconsin governor unites right and left in horror.

There are two entirely different ways to be horrified by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker comparing his battle with state unions to the fight against ISIS. If you haven’t heard, when he was asked how he’d combat the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq at the Conservative Political Action conference Thursday, he replied: “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.”

From the left, you can be disgusted by Walker comparing legal protests by labor unions and their supporters to the barbaric, blood-thirsty terrorism of ISIS. From the right, you can be appalled that Walker is clueless enough to suggest that standing up to peaceful protesters is remotely comparable to fighting a multi-national terror threat. Many people probably have both reactions; I know I did.

I’m not sure it’s enough to break the fever on the right that has delirious admirers seeing Walker as the 21st century Ronald Reagan. That might take a bigger dose of Walker idiocy – but it’s probably coming.

Once again, Walker’s hard-working communications staff had to clean up his mess with an emailed statement, just as they did last week after he said he didn’t know if President Obama is a Christian. Spokesperson Kristin Kukowski told reporters:

Governor Walker believes our fight against ISIS is one of the most important issues our country faces. He was in no way comparing any American citizen to ISIS. What the governor was saying was when faced with adversity he chooses strength and leadership. Those are the qualities we need to fix the leadership void this White House has created.

Walker himself tried denying that he’d compared Wisconsin protesters to ISIS. “You all will misconstrue things the way you see fit,” he whined to reporters after his speech, “but I think it’s pretty clear, that’s the closest thing I have in terms of handling a difficult situation, not that there’s any parallel between the two.”

It wasn’t just the stunning equation of peaceful protesters to ISIS that made Walker seem unready for the presidency during his CPAC speech. There he was, dead-eyed as usual, trying to claim that getting regular briefings from the FBI should count as foreign policy experience. He’s learned to punctuate his unremarkable remarks with a lame, Bill Clinton-style thumb-poke of faux-sincerity. It actually seemed sincere the first couple hundred times Clinton did it. Walker looks like he’s still practicing in front of a mirror. His light-blue shirt is baggy, his tie is too long, his hair is messy, not tousled; he looks like he’s running for Badger Boys State, not the presidency.

It turns out CPAC wasn’t the first time Walker has tried his “standing up to unions means I can whip ISIS” line. He made a similar argument at the New York event where Rudy Giuliani upstaged him by claiming President Obama doesn’t love America, according to Larry Kudlow, an event co-sponsor:

Walker argued that when Reagan fired the PATCO air-traffic controllers over their illegal strike, he was sending a message of toughness to Democrats and unions at home as well as our Soviet enemies abroad. Similarly, Walker believes his stance against unions in Wisconsin would be a signal of toughness to Islamic jihadists and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

If Kudlow is correct, that undermines Walker’s claim that he was merely citing the protests as an example of a “difficult situation” he’s faced. He thinks somehow ISIS in Iraq and Syria will be cowed by his battles on the steps of the Capitol in Madison.

That is a terrible response. First, taking on a bunch of protesters is not comparably difficult to taking on a Caliphate with sympathizers and terrorists around the globe, and saying so suggests Walker doesn’t quite understand the complexity of the challenge from ISIS and its allied groups.

Secondly, it is insulting to the protesters, a group I take no pleasure in defending. The protesters in Wisconsin, so furiously angry over Walker’s reforms and disruptive to the procedures of passing laws, earned plenty of legitimate criticism. But they’re not ISIS. They’re not beheading innocent people. They’re Americans, and as much as we may find their ideas, worldview, and perspective spectacularly wrongheaded, they don’t deserve to be compared to murderous terrorists.

I couldn’t put it better myself.

Walker is already complaining that this is another “gotcha” moment by the media, in the wake of those “gotcha” questions about whether Obama loves America or is truly a Christian as he publicly declares. As Digby reminds us, the Urban Dictionary aptly defines a “gotcha” question as one Sarah Palin is too dumb to answer.

Claiming fighting protesters prepared you to fight ISIS when asked about fighting terror? That’s an answer even Palin might have been too smart to give.

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http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/scott-walkers-political-record-lies-deceit-corruption-and-revengeScott Walker's Political Record of Lies, Deceit, Corruption and Revengehttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/85786289/0/alternet_election2012~Scott-Walkers-Political-Record-of-Lies-Deceit-Corruption-and-Revenge

“More Nixonian than Nixon” is the dead-on description of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, now viewed as a serious contender for the 2016 Republican nomination, in the eyes of former Nixon aide John Dean.

Nixon, the force behind Watergate’s sleazy, secretive fundraising from the super-rich and political dirty tricks, has perhaps met his match in Scott Walker, a governor who would literally delete “the search for truth” from a state mission statement—and then lie about it.

However, when I first met Walker I back in 1996, I would have described him as about the nicest conservative I had encountered in public life. I was lobbying for a progressive coalition, building support in the Wisconsin State Legislature for a campaign reform that would set up rapid disclosure of campaign contributions. Then-state Rep. Scott Walker proved to be an unexpected and enthusiastic sponsor.

Walker was one of the most conservative of Republican legislators, but he was unfailingly respectful and friendly to me as we held news conferences together and strategized over coffee about how to win passage of the disclosure bill. His friendliness and aw-shucks manner seemed to be grounded in his background as a small-town preacher’s son and Eagle Scout.

Beneath the Mask

But beneath the genial exterior lurks a classic passive-aggressive personality, with the aggressive side displaying grandiose ambition, a relentless drive to win at any cost, and a vision of essentially transforming Wisconsin—and then the nation—into a version of Mississippi offering a low-wage, docile, and disenfranchised (via restrictive voter ID laws like the one signed by Walker) workforce, shriveled public services and low corporate taxes.

Alert observers recently saw the essence of Walker encapsulated in his budget plan for the University of Wisconsin. The episode displayed the governor's drive to chain public institutions to serving private power as well as an extraordinary contempt for the truth.

Walker and his team had slyly deleted “the search for truth” from a passage on the University of Wisconsin’s central mission in his budget proposal. Also eliminated were references to the widely revered 111-year-old "Wisconsin Idea" committing the university to “public service.” The “Wisconsin Idea” linking the university to the needs of farmers, workers and other ordinary citizens was a product of Progressive-era leaders like Gov. Robert LaFollette, whose legacy Walker has long sought to undermine.

In place of “the search for truth,” unbounded debate and a public-interest orientation, Walker and his administration assigned the university a narrow, corporatized function of “meeting the workforce needs of the state.” Initially, Walker’s proposed UW budget drew intensified scrutiny because of $300 million in crippling cuts he proposed, which were coupled with other assaults on public education like weakening K-12 public education through more subsidies for private religious schools.

But repurposing the university’s mission touched a deeper nerve. Scouring through the budget, the progressive Center for Media and Democracy discovered and publicized the attempt to reset the university’s purpose as meeting corporate personnel needs. This triggered extensive coverage and an enormous furor arose across the state. The outrage spanned UW students, faculty, officials, alumni, and the broader citizenry.

Walker hastily retreated as public outcry expanded, sheepishly claiming the elimination of “the search for truth” and the beloved Wisconsin Idea was a mere “drafting error.” But that rationale quickly melted down after media reports showing that UW officials had strenuously objected to the rewriting of UW’s mission, but were ignored by Walker’s minions. Walker’s account about dumping “the search for the truth” turned out to be utterly untruthful.

This same pattern—of serving private wealth and power—is expected resurface later this week, as Walker and his Republican-majority statehouse take up “right-to-work” legislation, which exempts employees from paying union dues—hurting fundraising and organizing—even though Walker last fall said that wasn’t on his agenda when campaigning for re-election.

The pending right-to-work battle revives Walker’s venomous war on labor, which emerged in electrifying fashion in a Feb. 11, 2011 address just a month after he became governor. Like a strutting generalissimo, Walker announced that the state faced a “budget crisis” demanded the passage of Act 10, which would eradicate meaningful union-representation rights for most public employees. He did not go after police and fire fighter unions, which have long supported Republicans. In 1959, Wisconsin was the first state to grant such rights to public workers.

Ominously, Walker threatened to call out the National Guard if workers defied his Act 10 proposal with job actions. Walker viewed Act 10 as a move to “drop the bomb” on public employees, as he told his staff, and to politically isolate them with a cynical “divide and conquer” strategy.

However, the public responded quite differently from what Walker counted upon. When the public in Wisconsin and across the nation rallied behind the targeted workers—a mix of teachers, social workers and other civil servants—Walker was forced to escalate his war. Polls found (see here and here) 57% to 60% support for union rights.

Democracy a Casualty

Walker and his Republican allies rammed the bill through, violating both state open-meeting and legislative rules. The Republicans’ victory was also accompanied by a set of undemocratic tactics never seen before in the state, such as shutting off the microphones of dissenting legislators. Walker even admitted in a recorded phone call that he “had given some thought” to bringing in “troublemakers” to presumably stir up violent actions to discredit the thousands of peaceful protesters.

Act 10 was cemented into law when the State Supreme Court predictably affirmed it in a 4-3 vote. However, the mobilization against Walker’s Act 10 carried the fight into 2012 when nearly a million Wisconsinites signed petitions calling for the second recall of a governor in U.S. history. Walker managed to win 52% to 47% in June 2012, with his victory fueled by raising an estimated $60 million in contributions from billionaires around the nation—especially those in the libertarian network created by David and Charles Koch. A lackluster Democratic candidate also helped Walker keep his seat.

The recall campaign also revealed Walker no longer believed that political contributors and their donations should be fully and immediately disclosed—the basis of the legislation on which he and I first crossed paths. A “John Doe” investigation of Walker’s efforts by special state prosecutors into the recall’s shadowy financing showed that he surreptitiously sought to steer donations to his campaign into the “non-profit” Club for Growth, a corporate lobby group. That tactic kept confidential the six-figure donations from out-of-state billionaires.

Corruption, Paybacks and Revenge

The war over Act 10 reflected the political calculus Walker uses to approach any political issue, according to Scot Ross, director of the Madison-based liberal advocacy group One Wisconsin Now.

Ross first observed Walker in action on the Corrections Committee while serving as a legislative aide. “I saw Walker, and wondered, ‘Who is this guy always pushing for longer and longer sentences?’ It turns out that Walker was rewarding the private prison companies who were contributing to his campaigns” by devising laws that would keep Wisconsin’s prisons full.

Wisconsin’s prisons now house about eight times as many inmates as they did in 1970, and the state has the dubious distinction of incarcerating a higher percentage of black men than any other state. Walker’s strategy on prison-related issues exposed his fundamental political approach.

“Walker basically operates on issues by asking himself three questions,” said Ross. “First, how will my position reward my donors? Then, how will it punish my enemies? Finally, he asks himself, how it help me move up the political food chain?”

Walker’s shaping of policies to reward donors has produced a distinct pattern, said Mary Bottari, deputy director of the Center on Media and Democracy, which has studied Walker and his close connections to the Koch brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC, funded by corporate and libertarian donors, drafts model bills for like-minded legislators to carry in their states and cities.

“Scott Walker has an extremely narrow agenda. He’s picking off a list of deliverables for extreme out-of-state interests,” said Bottari. “None of these items are being demanded by Wisconsinites. He’s failing to serve his state.”

His Wisconsin Record: Dreadful

Walker has failed dismally to meet the most urgent needs of his Wisconsin constituents—jobs at family-supporting wages. He delivered less than half of the 250,000 jobs that he promised through his corporate-friendly tax and regulatory policies. At the time of Walker’s reelection last fall, Politifact reported that the total number of jobs created under his administration was just 111,295. Wisconsin ranked 34th in the nation and dead last in the Midwest in private sector job creation during his term.

Wisconsin’s job growth under Walker has been heavily concentrated in low-wage occupations, which expanded at a much greater rate than mid- and high-paying jobs. If anything, Walker has been the steward of widening inequality. The net job growth between 2010 and 2013 has been confined to low-wage jobs paying under $12.50 an hour, according to a recent study by Marc Levine, a UW economic development professor. Private-sector wages are fully 15% below the national average.

Faced with measurable poor policy results, Walker has sought to direct public resentment over sliding real wages and financial anxieties to the economic system’s biggest victims: the long-term unemployed. “My belief is we shouldn't be paying for them to sit on the couch, watching TV or playing Xbox,” Walker recently said. “We need to get them the skills to get back in the game and get back to work.”

In his new state budget, Walker proposes drug testing for recipients of unemployment insurance, food stamps and other public aid, prompting Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell to accuse him of practicing “yellow politics.” The proposal targets government aid recipients for political points, but is actually quite hollow. Walker knows that similar programs in other states have either been ruled illegal or proven to show a far lower rate of drug abuse among those receiving aid than the general population.

But Walker is running for president. So his agenda has been guided by scoring points with a right-wing base enraptured with confining public-sector services and enhancing corporate profits, imposing punitive social policies and reflecting unwavering faith in the “fewer benefits, higher jobs” formula expressed by financial guru Lawrence Kudlow (a CNBC commentator who champions marketplace solutions to every problem).

Walker has almost gleefully neglected the healthcare needs of low-income Wisconsinites. He remains one of a shrinking group of Republican governors who reject federal funding that would cover tens of thousands of low-income people lacking regular access to care—by expanding state-run Medicaid under Obamacare. Those federal subsidies would provide $345 million toward filling Wisconsin’s budget deficit of $2 billion.

To the delight of the anti-abortion crowd, Walker has terminated state funding of Planned Parenthood, curtailing health screenings and other vital non-abortion services the organization provides.

Thuggish and Proud of It

As he shifts his focus away from Wisconsin’s problems and toward his presidential race, Walker has again illustrated how richly he merits the “Nixonian” label bestowed by John Dean. His early campaign steps are displaying the same deceitful and cynical traits as he grovels for campaign cash.

At a lavish mid-February fundraiser for elite donors at New York City’s posh Club 21, he stood next to Rudy Giuliani as the former mayor issued an infantile, Michele Bachmann-style attack on President Obama’s patriotism. When asked to respond to the remarks, Walker passed up the opportunity to distance himself from the attack on Obama.

Once again, Walker provided a clear glimpse into his quest for power and his craven obeisance to conservative elites. His pandering to the far right will be on display this coming week in Wisconsin, as Walker’s allies in the GOP-majority legislature try to ram through yet more anti-labor legislation: a right-to-work bill, which allows employees in union-represented workplaces to opt out of joining unions and paying union dues.

Stepping back, it is clear that Walker is positioning himself to be the political water boy for the enormous fund-raising machine led by the libertarian industrialist Koch brothers, who have said they will try to raise nearly $900 million to spend on the 2016 elections. Walker hopes his combative and bullying style will allow him to win the White House and impose a 21st-century version of robber-baron capitalism on America.

As former White House counsel John Dean warned, Walker is “more Nixonian than Nixon.”

“More Nixonian than Nixon” is the dead-on description of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, now viewed as a serious contender for the 2016 Republican nomination, in the eyes of former Nixon aide John Dean.

Nixon, the force behind Watergate’s sleazy, secretive fundraising from the super-rich and political dirty tricks, has perhaps met his match in Scott Walker, a governor who would literally delete “the search for truth” from a state mission statement—and then lie about it.

However, when I first met Walker I back in 1996, I would have described him as about the nicest conservative I had encountered in public life. I was lobbying for a progressive coalition, building support in the Wisconsin State Legislature for a campaign reform that would set up rapid disclosure of campaign contributions. Then-state Rep. Scott Walker proved to be an unexpected and enthusiastic sponsor.

Walker was one of the most conservative of Republican legislators, but he was unfailingly respectful and friendly to me as we held news conferences together and strategized over coffee about how to win passage of the disclosure bill. His friendliness and aw-shucks manner seemed to be grounded in his background as a small-town preacher’s son and Eagle Scout.

Beneath the Mask

But beneath the genial exterior lurks a classic passive-aggressive personality, with the aggressive side displaying grandiose ambition, a relentless drive to win at any cost, and a vision of essentially transforming Wisconsin—and then the nation—into a version of Mississippi offering a low-wage, docile, and disenfranchised (via restrictive voter ID laws like the one signed by Walker) workforce, shriveled public services and low corporate taxes.

Alert observers recently saw the essence of Walker encapsulated in his budget plan for the University of Wisconsin. The episode displayed the governor's drive to chain public institutions to serving private power as well as an extraordinary contempt for the truth.

Walker and his team had slyly deleted “the search for truth” from a passage on the University of Wisconsin’s central mission in his budget proposal. Also eliminated were references to the widely revered 111-year-old "Wisconsin Idea" committing the university to “public service.” The “Wisconsin Idea” linking the university to the needs of farmers, workers and other ordinary citizens was a product of Progressive-era leaders like Gov. Robert LaFollette, whose legacy Walker has long sought to undermine.

In place of “the search for truth,” unbounded debate and a public-interest orientation, Walker and his administration assigned the university a narrow, corporatized function of “meeting the workforce needs of the state.” Initially, Walker’s proposed UW budget drew intensified scrutiny because of $300 million in crippling cuts he proposed, which were coupled with other assaults on public education like weakening K-12 public education through more subsidies for private religious schools.

But repurposing the university’s mission touched a deeper nerve. Scouring through the budget, the progressive Center for Media and Democracy discovered and publicized the attempt to reset the university’s purpose as meeting corporate personnel needs. This triggered extensive coverage and an enormous furor arose across the state. The outrage spanned UW students, faculty, officials, alumni, and the broader citizenry.

Walker hastily retreated as public outcry expanded, sheepishly claiming the elimination of “the search for truth” and the beloved Wisconsin Idea was a mere “drafting error.” But that rationale quickly melted down after media reports showing that UW officials had strenuously objected to the rewriting of UW’s mission, but were ignored by Walker’s minions. Walker’s account about dumping “the search for the truth” turned out to be utterly untruthful.

This same pattern—of serving private wealth and power—is expected resurface later this week, as Walker and his Republican-majority statehouse take up “right-to-work” legislation, which exempts employees from paying union dues—hurting fundraising and organizing—even though Walker last fall said that wasn’t on his agenda when campaigning for re-election.

The pending right-to-work battle revives Walker’s venomous war on labor, which emerged in electrifying fashion in a Feb. 11, 2011 address just a month after he became governor. Like a strutting generalissimo, Walker announced that the state faced a “budget crisis” demanded the passage of Act 10, which would eradicate meaningful union-representation rights for most public employees. He did not go after police and fire fighter unions, which have long supported Republicans. In 1959, Wisconsin was the first state to grant such rights to public workers.

Ominously, Walker threatened to call out the National Guard if workers defied his Act 10 proposal with job actions. Walker viewed Act 10 as a move to “drop the bomb” on public employees, as he told his staff, and to politically isolate them with a cynical “divide and conquer” strategy.

However, the public responded quite differently from what Walker counted upon. When the public in Wisconsin and across the nation rallied behind the targeted workers—a mix of teachers, social workers and other civil servants—Walker was forced to escalate his war. Polls found (see here and here) 57% to 60% support for union rights.

Democracy a Casualty

Walker and his Republican allies rammed the bill through, violating both state open-meeting and legislative rules. The Republicans’ victory was also accompanied by a set of undemocratic tactics never seen before in the state, such as shutting off the microphones of dissenting legislators. Walker even admitted in a recorded phone call that he “had given some thought” to bringing in “troublemakers” to presumably stir up violent actions to discredit the thousands of peaceful protesters.

Act 10 was cemented into law when the State Supreme Court predictably affirmed it in a 4-3 vote. However, the mobilization against Walker’s Act 10 carried the fight into 2012 when nearly a million Wisconsinites signed petitions calling for the second recall of a governor in U.S. history. Walker managed to win 52% to 47% in June 2012, with his victory fueled by raising an estimated $60 million in contributions from billionaires around the nation—especially those in the libertarian network created by David and Charles Koch. A lackluster Democratic candidate also helped Walker keep his seat.

The recall campaign also revealed Walker no longer believed that political contributors and their donations should be fully and immediately disclosed—the basis of the legislation on which he and I first crossed paths. A “John Doe” investigation of Walker’s efforts by special state prosecutors into the recall’s shadowy financing showed that he surreptitiously sought to steer donations to his campaign into the “non-profit” Club for Growth, a corporate lobby group. That tactic kept confidential the six-figure donations from out-of-state billionaires.

Corruption, Paybacks and Revenge

The war over Act 10 reflected the political calculus Walker uses to approach any political issue, according to Scot Ross, director of the Madison-based liberal advocacy group One Wisconsin Now.

Ross first observed Walker in action on the Corrections Committee while serving as a legislative aide. “I saw Walker, and wondered, ‘Who is this guy always pushing for longer and longer sentences?’ It turns out that Walker was rewarding the private prison companies who were contributing to his campaigns” by devising laws that would keep Wisconsin’s prisons full.

Wisconsin’s prisons now house about eight times as many inmates as they did in 1970, and the state has the dubious distinction of incarcerating a higher percentage of black men than any other state. Walker’s strategy on prison-related issues exposed his fundamental political approach.

“Walker basically operates on issues by asking himself three questions,” said Ross. “First, how will my position reward my donors? Then, how will it punish my enemies? Finally, he asks himself, how it help me move up the political food chain?”

Walker’s shaping of policies to reward donors has produced a distinct pattern, said Mary Bottari, deputy director of the Center on Media and Democracy, which has studied Walker and his close connections to the Koch brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC, funded by corporate and libertarian donors, drafts model bills for like-minded legislators to carry in their states and cities.

“Scott Walker has an extremely narrow agenda. He’s picking off a list of deliverables for extreme out-of-state interests,” said Bottari. “None of these items are being demanded by Wisconsinites. He’s failing to serve his state.”

His Wisconsin Record: Dreadful

Walker has failed dismally to meet the most urgent needs of his Wisconsin constituents—jobs at family-supporting wages. He delivered less than half of the 250,000 jobs that he promised through his corporate-friendly tax and regulatory policies. At the time of Walker’s reelection last fall, Politifact reported that the total number of jobs created under his administration was just 111,295. Wisconsin ranked 34th in the nation and dead last in the Midwest in private sector job creation during his term.

Wisconsin’s job growth under Walker has been heavily concentrated in low-wage occupations, which expanded at a much greater rate than mid- and high-paying jobs. If anything, Walker has been the steward of widening inequality. The net job growth between 2010 and 2013 has been confined to low-wage jobs paying under $12.50 an hour, according to a recent study by Marc Levine, a UW economic development professor. Private-sector wages are fully 15% below the national average.

Faced with measurable poor policy results, Walker has sought to direct public resentment over sliding real wages and financial anxieties to the economic system’s biggest victims: the long-term unemployed. “My belief is we shouldn't be paying for them to sit on the couch, watching TV or playing Xbox,” Walker recently said. “We need to get them the skills to get back in the game and get back to work.”

In his new state budget, Walker proposes drug testing for recipients of unemployment insurance, food stamps and other public aid, prompting Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell to accuse him of practicing “yellow politics.” The proposal targets government aid recipients for political points, but is actually quite hollow. Walker knows that similar programs in other states have either been ruled illegal or proven to show a far lower rate of drug abuse among those receiving aid than the general population.

But Walker is running for president. So his agenda has been guided by scoring points with a right-wing base enraptured with confining public-sector services and enhancing corporate profits, imposing punitive social policies and reflecting unwavering faith in the “fewer benefits, higher jobs” formula expressed by financial guru Lawrence Kudlow (a CNBC commentator who champions marketplace solutions to every problem).

Walker has almost gleefully neglected the healthcare needs of low-income Wisconsinites. He remains one of a shrinking group of Republican governors who reject federal funding that would cover tens of thousands of low-income people lacking regular access to care—by expanding state-run Medicaid under Obamacare. Those federal subsidies would provide $345 million toward filling Wisconsin’s budget deficit of $2 billion.

To the delight of the anti-abortion crowd, Walker has terminated state funding of Planned Parenthood, curtailing health screenings and other vital non-abortion services the organization provides.

Thuggish and Proud of It

As he shifts his focus away from Wisconsin’s problems and toward his presidential race, Walker has again illustrated how richly he merits the “Nixonian” label bestowed by John Dean. His early campaign steps are displaying the same deceitful and cynical traits as he grovels for campaign cash.

At a lavish mid-February fundraiser for elite donors at New York City’s posh Club 21, he stood next to Rudy Giuliani as the former mayor issued an infantile, Michele Bachmann-style attack on President Obama’s patriotism. When asked to respond to the remarks, Walker passed up the opportunity to distance himself from the attack on Obama.

Once again, Walker provided a clear glimpse into his quest for power and his craven obeisance to conservative elites. His pandering to the far right will be on display this coming week in Wisconsin, as Walker’s allies in the GOP-majority legislature try to ram through yet more anti-labor legislation: a right-to-work bill, which allows employees in union-represented workplaces to opt out of joining unions and paying union dues.

Stepping back, it is clear that Walker is positioning himself to be the political water boy for the enormous fund-raising machine led by the libertarian industrialist Koch brothers, who have said they will try to raise nearly $900 million to spend on the 2016 elections. Walker hopes his combative and bullying style will allow him to win the White House and impose a 21st-century version of robber-baron capitalism on America.

As former White House counsel John Dean warned, Walker is “more Nixonian than Nixon.”

So … Scott Walker is all but officially running for president, and the country is getting a look at a man whom we residents of Wisconsin have been living with since before he became governor. While the national press has focused on the policies and conservative ideology that Walker has imposed on our state, these don’t define the man or explain the mayhem he has caused here.

The massive protests against Walker in 2011 began with “Act 10,” which stripped public employee unions of almost all of their rights and power. Walker loves to leave the story there and depicts ongoing opposition to him as a fight between him and the unions. It’s a narrative that sells well to his donors and to a national press eager for narrative simplicity.

But Act 10 was only a triggering event, not the sole or even primary motivation of Walker’s opponents. While much of the opposition to Walker centers around his policies, there is more to it than that. It is the way he implements these policies, the way he deals with opposition, and the way he rewards his allies that make Walker not just divisive, but frightening. Even conservatives who share Walker’s ideology should distrust him, and dread the prospect of him becoming president.

Why? Here is a brief primer on Scott Walker, drawn from what we have learned about him first-hand here in Wisconsin. These are things that the rest of the country should know in order to avoid learning the same lessons the hard way—on a national and international platform of the presidency.

1. Scott Walker is a liar.

“So what?” you say, “aren’t all politicians liars?” True, but Walker is in a league apart. He lies about so much, even inconsequential things, that it seems almost compulsive.

His recent lies explaining how “searching for truth” and other aspects of the “Wisconsin Idea” came to be stricken from his rewrite of the University of Wisconsin mission statement were astounding enough to draw rebuke from the New York Times editorial board, but such lies compose a large part of almost all of Walker’s public statements.

Like most politicians, Walker lies when it is politically convenient to do so; unlike most politicians, Walker lies when the truth is already firmly established, such as when he claims that Wisconsin has a budget surplus (it doesn’t), or that he never considered planting agents provocateurs among the demonstrators (he did). For Walker, deceit is not only a tool; it is an end in itself, his default mode. Walker even lies about things that have no obvious political angle, like the date of the births of his sons and how he got his bald spot.

Walker’s lies often take the form of self-aggrandizing fantasy, a large helping of which he served up in his ironically titled [for someone who almost never appears in public] ghost-written political autobiography, Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge. In it, for example, Walker recounts how during the peak of the 2011 protests, a mob surrounded his car and tried to tip it over. This incident never happened, at least not to Walker, though Walker’s story bears a remarkable similarity to a 1958 attack on Richard Nixon’s car in Venezuela.

2. Scott Walker is astoundingly corrupt, even by current political standards.

He is so corrupt the corruption itself gives him cover, because an objective description of it sounds like a hyperbolic screed, leading to an “Oh, come on, he can’t be as bad as all that” from people who don’t know his history.

He IS that bad. Here’s his tea party brag that shows he’s more extreme than conservative. During the past few years, the fact that he has not yet actually been indicted for a crime is the strongest defense of his character that his supporters have been able to mount.

Walker’s reputation for political cunning, reflected in the oft-repeated warnings to not underestimate him, derives from his lack of moral restraint and his willingness to do anything to get what he wants, rather than from any tactical brilliance or deep understanding of people. It’s “the ends justify the means” on steroids. This, combined with the ineptitude of the Wisconsin Democrats and the Wisconsin press, answers an obvious question about Walker: How could someone of such mediocre abilities be so successful?

Walker’s known political career began in 1988, when he ran for president of the Associated Students of Marquette University. He didn’t win, but he was found guilty of violating campaign rules. After trying to lie his way out of it, he was forced to admit the truth of the charges. The Marquette Tribune ran an editorial before the election declaring that Walker was “unfit for presidency.” Like much of Walker’s past, the details of why he left Marquette before graduating are secrets.

It may seem petty to bring up an incident from so long ago, but Walker has continued to show the pattern he revealed at Marquette in every job he has held since about which there is any public information. His lies about the “Wisconsin Idea” and getting caught in them prove he has not changed. In fact, past and ongoing criminal investigations into Walker’s administrations, both as Milwaukee County executive and as governor, have resulted in multiple felony convictions of close Walker associates, and charges ranging from misuse of county resources for political purposes, to embezzling funds raised to help wives and children of veterans, to child enticement.

Among the felons is Tim Russell, Walker’s political mentor from shortly after he left Marquette, and one of the very few people who can be identified as a personal friend of Walker. Walker himself so far has escaped indictment, but public records of the investigation, some accidentally released, leave little doubt that Walker knew about and used (and perhaps continues to use) an illegal in-house email system to illegally coordinate his public offices with his political campaigns, and to evade open records laws. The latest criminal probe has identified Walker as part of a “criminal scheme” to evade campaign finance laws by arranging to have donations to his recall election laundered through Koch-funded super PACs.

But lies and corruption are not the end of the story. They merely set the stage for what is truly frightening about a possible Walker presidency.

3. Walker does not tolerate opposition.

This applies not only to opposition from other politicians (although it certainly applies to them, too—see the fate of Mike Ellis) but to everyone. Suppression of dissent through intimidation is one of the chief features of the Walker governorship, and a main source of the fear and discord Walker has inflicted on his state.

But much of the dirty work of intimidation is carried out by a network of right-wing groups that operate with a wink and nod from the administration, allied with unscrupulous legislators, Koch-funded lobbyists, and new right-wing media outlets set up by out-of-state billionaires. The most obvious of these intimidation efforts is a digitized, searchable online database of the one million people who signed a petition demanding Walker’s recall. The barely unstated purpose of this list is to keep petition signers from being hired by pro-Walker businesses. Walker himself withdrew the student representative nominee for the Board of Regents because his name appeared on the list.

People who do not limit their dissent to petition signing can expect harsher treatment. Opponents of Walker’s mine deregulation legislation, crafted specifically to allow Florida billionaire Chris Cline to open an iron mine in northern Wisconsin (and Walker’s one and only “jobs initiative”) have been attacked openly in right-wing outlets like the Bradley-funded “Media Trackers,” and behind the scenes by state legislators. Mine opponents have had their jobs threatened, sometimes with success. Many have received death threats.

4. Under Walker, Wisconsin literally has become a lawless state.

The state has become a playground for the Walker regime and its supporters, and a dangerous place for the rest of us. State agencies, most notably the Departments of Justice, Administration, and Natural Resources are fully under the control of Walker and his minions. Scientists and professionals have been replaced by political cronies who know nothing about the jobs they are supposed to do.

Ultimately, corruption and intimidation are unchecked in Wisconsin for two reasons: the State Supreme Court and the Wisconsin press. The State Supreme Court is controlled by four ethically challenged Walker allies who barely even pretend to be honest, and who Walker and his friends can count on to make problems go away.

Meanwhile, the Wisconsin press has mostly been asleep. A few articles describe each new revelation of Walker’s deceit or corruption, with follow-up articles giving Walker’s explanation, and there the matter is left. Walker is almost never asked difficult questions or pressed to explain his often incoherent answers. Thus Walker’s friends can openly violate the law with little fear of either prosecution or sustained scrutiny. When Chris Cline, in clear violation of state law, sent heavily armed and unlicensed mercenaries to his proposed mining site in the Penokee Mountains, a publicity stunt designed to raise the specter of “eco-terrorism,” no charges were ever filed and press coverage of the story quickly vanished.

The mysterious late “discovery” of 14,000 votes in Waukesha County, which swung a State Supreme Court election to Walker ally David Prosser and thereby maintained Walker’s control over the court, has never been adequately investigated, despite hundreds of suspicious irregularities and serious evidence of ballot tampering discovered during the state-mandated recount. The Government Accountability Board, the state agency that should have investigated this evidence, did not even look at it before certifying the election results.

The press accepted the results without question and never reported on the evidence of fraud. Illegal campaign donations, physical attacks on Walker opponents circulating recall petitions, online threats by pro-Walker groups such as “Knot my Wisconsin” and “Operation Burn Notice” have all gone unpunished and largely unreported.

Scott Walker has damaged the legal and political system of Wisconsin so badly that it may never recover. His house of cards is collapsing and even the state GOP knows it. It is only because Wisconsin is just a state within a larger country, and not an independent country on its own, that it has not descended into totalitarian dictatorship. Scott Walker does not scorn moral constraints on his actions. Rather, he seems to not comprehend such constraints. Walker’s only limit is the limit of his power, and it is this limit that Walker wants to eliminate by becoming president.

So … Scott Walker is all but officially running for president, and the country is getting a look at a man whom we residents of Wisconsin have been living with since before he became governor. While the national press has focused on the policies and conservative ideology that Walker has imposed on our state, these don’t define the man or explain the mayhem he has caused here.

The massive protests against Walker in 2011 began with “Act 10,” which stripped public employee unions of almost all of their rights and power. Walker loves to leave the story there and depicts ongoing opposition to him as a fight between him and the unions. It’s a narrative that sells well to his donors and to a national press eager for narrative simplicity.

But Act 10 was only a triggering event, not the sole or even primary motivation of Walker’s opponents. While much of the opposition to Walker centers around his policies, there is more to it than that. It is the way he implements these policies, the way he deals with opposition, and the way he rewards his allies that make Walker not just divisive, but frightening. Even conservatives who share Walker’s ideology should distrust him, and dread the prospect of him becoming president.

Why? Here is a brief primer on Scott Walker, drawn from what we have learned about him first-hand here in Wisconsin. These are things that the rest of the country should know in order to avoid learning the same lessons the hard way—on a national and international platform of the presidency.

1. Scott Walker is a liar.

“So what?” you say, “aren’t all politicians liars?” True, but Walker is in a league apart. He lies about so much, even inconsequential things, that it seems almost compulsive.

His recent lies explaining how “searching for truth” and other aspects of the “Wisconsin Idea” came to be stricken from his rewrite of the University of Wisconsin mission statement were astounding enough to draw rebuke from the New York Times editorial board, but such lies compose a large part of almost all of Walker’s public statements.

Like most politicians, Walker lies when it is politically convenient to do so; unlike most politicians, Walker lies when the truth is already firmly established, such as when he claims that Wisconsin has a budget surplus (it doesn’t), or that he never considered planting agents provocateurs among the demonstrators (he did). For Walker, deceit is not only a tool; it is an end in itself, his default mode. Walker even lies about things that have no obvious political angle, like the date of the births of his sons and how he got his bald spot.

Walker’s lies often take the form of self-aggrandizing fantasy, a large helping of which he served up in his ironically titled [for someone who almost never appears in public] ghost-written political autobiography, Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge. In it, for example, Walker recounts how during the peak of the 2011 protests, a mob surrounded his car and tried to tip it over. This incident never happened, at least not to Walker, though Walker’s story bears a remarkable similarity to a 1958 attack on Richard Nixon’s car in Venezuela.

2. Scott Walker is astoundingly corrupt, even by current political standards.

He is so corrupt the corruption itself gives him cover, because an objective description of it sounds like a hyperbolic screed, leading to an “Oh, come on, he can’t be as bad as all that” from people who don’t know his history.

He IS that bad. Here’s his tea party brag that shows he’s more extreme than conservative. During the past few years, the fact that he has not yet actually been indicted for a crime is the strongest defense of his character that his supporters have been able to mount.

Walker’s reputation for political cunning, reflected in the oft-repeated warnings to not underestimate him, derives from his lack of moral restraint and his willingness to do anything to get what he wants, rather than from any tactical brilliance or deep understanding of people. It’s “the ends justify the means” on steroids. This, combined with the ineptitude of the Wisconsin Democrats and the Wisconsin press, answers an obvious question about Walker: How could someone of such mediocre abilities be so successful?

Walker’s known political career began in 1988, when he ran for president of the Associated Students of Marquette University. He didn’t win, but he was found guilty of violating campaign rules. After trying to lie his way out of it, he was forced to admit the truth of the charges. The Marquette Tribune ran an editorial before the election declaring that Walker was “unfit for presidency.” Like much of Walker’s past, the details of why he left Marquette before graduating are secrets.

It may seem petty to bring up an incident from so long ago, but Walker has continued to show the pattern he revealed at Marquette in every job he has held since about which there is any public information. His lies about the “Wisconsin Idea” and getting caught in them prove he has not changed. In fact, past and ongoing criminal investigations into Walker’s administrations, both as Milwaukee County executive and as governor, have resulted in multiple felony convictions of close Walker associates, and charges ranging from misuse of county resources for political purposes, to embezzling funds raised to help wives and children of veterans, to child enticement.

Among the felons is Tim Russell, Walker’s political mentor from shortly after he left Marquette, and one of the very few people who can be identified as a personal friend of Walker. Walker himself so far has escaped indictment, but public records of the investigation, some accidentally released, leave little doubt that Walker knew about and used (and perhaps continues to use) an illegal in-house email system to illegally coordinate his public offices with his political campaigns, and to evade open records laws. The latest criminal probe has identified Walker as part of a “criminal scheme” to evade campaign finance laws by arranging to have donations to his recall election laundered through Koch-funded super PACs.

But lies and corruption are not the end of the story. They merely set the stage for what is truly frightening about a possible Walker presidency.

3. Walker does not tolerate opposition.

This applies not only to opposition from other politicians (although it certainly applies to them, too—see the fate of Mike Ellis) but to everyone. Suppression of dissent through intimidation is one of the chief features of the Walker governorship, and a main source of the fear and discord Walker has inflicted on his state.

But much of the dirty work of intimidation is carried out by a network of right-wing groups that operate with a wink and nod from the administration, allied with unscrupulous legislators, Koch-funded lobbyists, and new right-wing media outlets set up by out-of-state billionaires. The most obvious of these intimidation efforts is a digitized, searchable online database of the one million people who signed a petition demanding Walker’s recall. The barely unstated purpose of this list is to keep petition signers from being hired by pro-Walker businesses. Walker himself withdrew the student representative nominee for the Board of Regents because his name appeared on the list.

People who do not limit their dissent to petition signing can expect harsher treatment. Opponents of Walker’s mine deregulation legislation, crafted specifically to allow Florida billionaire Chris Cline to open an iron mine in northern Wisconsin (and Walker’s one and only “jobs initiative”) have been attacked openly in right-wing outlets like the Bradley-funded “Media Trackers,” and behind the scenes by state legislators. Mine opponents have had their jobs threatened, sometimes with success. Many have received death threats.

4. Under Walker, Wisconsin literally has become a lawless state.

The state has become a playground for the Walker regime and its supporters, and a dangerous place for the rest of us. State agencies, most notably the Departments of Justice, Administration, and Natural Resources are fully under the control of Walker and his minions. Scientists and professionals have been replaced by political cronies who know nothing about the jobs they are supposed to do.

Ultimately, corruption and intimidation are unchecked in Wisconsin for two reasons: the State Supreme Court and the Wisconsin press. The State Supreme Court is controlled by four ethically challenged Walker allies who barely even pretend to be honest, and who Walker and his friends can count on to make problems go away.

Meanwhile, the Wisconsin press has mostly been asleep. A few articles describe each new revelation of Walker’s deceit or corruption, with follow-up articles giving Walker’s explanation, and there the matter is left. Walker is almost never asked difficult questions or pressed to explain his often incoherent answers. Thus Walker’s friends can openly violate the law with little fear of either prosecution or sustained scrutiny. When Chris Cline, in clear violation of state law, sent heavily armed and unlicensed mercenaries to his proposed mining site in the Penokee Mountains, a publicity stunt designed to raise the specter of “eco-terrorism,” no charges were ever filed and press coverage of the story quickly vanished.

The mysterious late “discovery” of 14,000 votes in Waukesha County, which swung a State Supreme Court election to Walker ally David Prosser and thereby maintained Walker’s control over the court, has never been adequately investigated, despite hundreds of suspicious irregularities and serious evidence of ballot tampering discovered during the state-mandated recount. The Government Accountability Board, the state agency that should have investigated this evidence, did not even look at it before certifying the election results.

The press accepted the results without question and never reported on the evidence of fraud. Illegal campaign donations, physical attacks on Walker opponents circulating recall petitions, online threats by pro-Walker groups such as “Knot my Wisconsin” and “Operation Burn Notice” have all gone unpunished and largely unreported.

Scott Walker has damaged the legal and political system of Wisconsin so badly that it may never recover. His house of cards is collapsing and even the state GOP knows it. It is only because Wisconsin is just a state within a larger country, and not an independent country on its own, that it has not descended into totalitarian dictatorship. Scott Walker does not scorn moral constraints on his actions. Rather, he seems to not comprehend such constraints. Walker’s only limit is the limit of his power, and it is this limit that Walker wants to eliminate by becoming president.

]]>
http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/tea-party-getting-worse-media-may-want-new-narrative-gop-still-nutsThe Tea Party is Getting Worse: Media May Want a New Narrative, but GOP is Still Nutshttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/85357430/0/alternet_election2012~The-Tea-Party-is-Getting-Worse-Media-May-Want-a-New-Narrative-but-GOP-is-Still-Nuts

It is a cardinal rule of horserace-style political journalism in the U.S. that no two elections can have the same narrative. That’s not to say certain tropes aren’t repeated ad nauseam. But it is to say that that the press corps’ desire to mitigate the unavoidable, soul-crushing monotony of a campaign often causes it to flip the script from one election to the next, despite politics in the real world changing much more slowly. If you look at the way the media’s covered the ongoing “invisible primary” to be the GOP’s next presidential nominee, you’ll see the narrative for 2016 is being pre-written already.

So, because the most important story of the 2012 cycle was the surprising potency of President Obama’s so-called Rising American Electorate, the story in 2014 concerned theRepublicans’ electorate, which also proved itself to be alive and kicking. And because the story after 2012 focused on the Tea Party pulling Mitt Romney too far to the right, the narrative for 2016 will be about the Republican “establishment” throwing its weight around to nominate an ostensibly more moderate, electable candidate. The bland, cautious, managerial Republican Party of yesteryear is back! The crusading, militant and extremist Tea Party is over!

Let’s stick with the South Carolina example for a moment, because I think it tells us much about the contemporary GOP’s character. According to Kimberly Johnson of Al Jazeera America, the recent decision on the part of PTR Industries, a gun manufacturer, to move its headquarters from Connecticut to South Carolina has inspired Republican state Rep. Alan Clemmons to propose what he’s calling the “Second Amendment Education Act.” As the name implies, the bill would “provide all public elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools” with “instruction in the Second Amendment” for no fewer than “three consecutive weeks in one grading period in each academic year.” The curriculum would be written by the NRA, of course.

Anyone who does not consider Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s frequently rabid executive vice president and chief public representative, to be a proper author of school children’s education might look on this proposal skeptically. They might wonder if it’s not exactly the kind of big government social engineering that Tea Partyers, who often accuse the left of changing the culture to reflect its worldview, usually decry. They might also worry that the bill is an example of the crony capitalism the Tea Party says it hates, with the government aiding a friendly and favored industry — or picking winners and losers, as they like to say. What the Al Jazeera report shows is that, on both counts, these fears would be correct.

“It’s a big handshake,” is how PTR Industries purchasing manager Bob Grabowski described Clemmons’ bill. “It’s a big ‘hello’.” He recounted how his company was treated by South Carolina locals, who are desperate for good-paying jobs in a state where the unemployment rate remains significantly higher than the national average. He and his co-workers were made to feel, he said, like “rock stars.” He praised Clemmons for his support of PTR; he said the lawmaker “really went to bat” on its behalf. He loves the bill Clemmons came up with, too: “I think it’s an awesome idea,” he said, more of “a handshake” to his industry than “a nod.” Why? Because it’s “right out in the open.”

The bill’s implications for the way future graduates of South Carolina’s public school system will see the world are no less momentous. The communications director for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Ladd Everitt, told Al Jazeera that the possibility of the NRA writing a three-week-long curriculum is “a nightmare,” because the organization “endorses an insurrectionist interpretation of the Second Amendment.” As if there wasn’t enough of this in South Carolina already, an NRA-penned review of American history would leave millions of children under the impression that the Framers saw the Constitution much the same as the men behind the Confederate States of America. Fond as they are of quoting Orwell, the Tea Partyers have evidently taken to heart his famous quote about the past and the future.

As we see in South Carolina, then, the Republican Party narrative of 2010, 2012 and 2014 hasn’t drifted into the past just yet. The media may shudder at the prospect of a fourth-straight election with the Tea Party as the most influential and most significant actor. It may prefer to imagine the GOP is in the midst of an intellectual revival. It may hope that the “reasonable conservative” is on his way back to the arena, saving nominally objective reporters from finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of thinking one of the people who might be president sounds kind of crazy.

But none of that particularly matters, because the Republican Party is still being driven by the Tea Party. And the Tea Party remains what it’s always been: A collection of dedicated, unsentimental and ambitious ideologues who don’t see themselves as responsible, competent managers, but as conservative crusaders on a transformative, holy mission.

It is a cardinal rule of horserace-style political journalism in the U.S. that no two elections can have the same narrative. That’s not to say certain tropes aren’t repeated ad nauseam. But it is to say that that the press corps’ desire to mitigate the unavoidable, soul-crushing monotony of a campaign often causes it to flip the script from one election to the next, despite politics in the real world changing much more slowly. If you look at the way the media’s covered the ongoing “invisible primary” to be the GOP’s next presidential nominee, you’ll see the narrative for 2016 is being pre-written already.

So, because the most important story of the 2012 cycle was the surprising potency of President Obama’s so-called Rising American Electorate, the story in 2014 concerned theRepublicans’ electorate, which also proved itself to be alive and kicking. And because the story after 2012 focused on the Tea Party pulling Mitt Romney too far to the right, the narrative for 2016 will be about the Republican “establishment” throwing its weight around to nominate an ostensibly more moderate, electable candidate. The bland, cautious, managerial Republican Party of yesteryear is back! The crusading, militant and extremist Tea Party is over!

Let’s stick with the South Carolina example for a moment, because I think it tells us much about the contemporary GOP’s character. According to Kimberly Johnson of Al Jazeera America, the recent decision on the part of PTR Industries, a gun manufacturer, to move its headquarters from Connecticut to South Carolina has inspired Republican state Rep. Alan Clemmons to propose what he’s calling the “Second Amendment Education Act.” As the name implies, the bill would “provide all public elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools” with “instruction in the Second Amendment” for no fewer than “three consecutive weeks in one grading period in each academic year.” The curriculum would be written by the NRA, of course.

Anyone who does not consider Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s frequently rabid executive vice president and chief public representative, to be a proper author of school children’s education might look on this proposal skeptically. They might wonder if it’s not exactly the kind of big government social engineering that Tea Partyers, who often accuse the left of changing the culture to reflect its worldview, usually decry. They might also worry that the bill is an example of the crony capitalism the Tea Party says it hates, with the government aiding a friendly and favored industry — or picking winners and losers, as they like to say. What the Al Jazeera report shows is that, on both counts, these fears would be correct.

“It’s a big handshake,” is how PTR Industries purchasing manager Bob Grabowski described Clemmons’ bill. “It’s a big ‘hello’.” He recounted how his company was treated by South Carolina locals, who are desperate for good-paying jobs in a state where the unemployment rate remains significantly higher than the national average. He and his co-workers were made to feel, he said, like “rock stars.” He praised Clemmons for his support of PTR; he said the lawmaker “really went to bat” on its behalf. He loves the bill Clemmons came up with, too: “I think it’s an awesome idea,” he said, more of “a handshake” to his industry than “a nod.” Why? Because it’s “right out in the open.”

The bill’s implications for the way future graduates of South Carolina’s public school system will see the world are no less momentous. The communications director for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Ladd Everitt, told Al Jazeera that the possibility of the NRA writing a three-week-long curriculum is “a nightmare,” because the organization “endorses an insurrectionist interpretation of the Second Amendment.” As if there wasn’t enough of this in South Carolina already, an NRA-penned review of American history would leave millions of children under the impression that the Framers saw the Constitution much the same as the men behind the Confederate States of America. Fond as they are of quoting Orwell, the Tea Partyers have evidently taken to heart his famous quote about the past and the future.

As we see in South Carolina, then, the Republican Party narrative of 2010, 2012 and 2014 hasn’t drifted into the past just yet. The media may shudder at the prospect of a fourth-straight election with the Tea Party as the most influential and most significant actor. It may prefer to imagine the GOP is in the midst of an intellectual revival. It may hope that the “reasonable conservative” is on his way back to the arena, saving nominally objective reporters from finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of thinking one of the people who might be president sounds kind of crazy.

But none of that particularly matters, because the Republican Party is still being driven by the Tea Party. And the Tea Party remains what it’s always been: A collection of dedicated, unsentimental and ambitious ideologues who don’t see themselves as responsible, competent managers, but as conservative crusaders on a transformative, holy mission.

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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/jeb-bushs-wingnutty-pastJeb’s Quiet Wingnutty Past: Why He Has to Distance Himself from...Himselfhttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/85261364/0/alternet_election2012~Jeb%e2%80%99s-Quiet-Wingnutty-Past-Why-He-Has-to-Distance-Himself-fromHimself

All the geniuses calling Jeb Bush the "moderate" candidate in the GOP primary are missing one thing: his history.

One of the more amusing aspects of he Republican establishment’s quest to anoint Jeb Bush as the “moderate” candidate who can bring all sides together is that the poor man is going to have to walk a tightrope made of dental floss over the next year or so — as he attempts to obscure his wingnutty past from the donor class, without alienating the right wingers he needs to vote for him. Managing these two competing constituencies is a difficult task for all the GOP presidential hopefuls, but Bush’s is perhaps the toughest.

There has been a lot of talk about how he will have to find a way to adequately explain his support for immigration reform and the Common Core education curriculum to the base, which loathes those two programs with a fervor they usually reserve for gay marriage and arugula. He seems to be picking his way through that and we’ll see soon enough if he still has the political chops he developed as Governor of Florida to successfully dogwhistle the base while offering a sheen of “reasonableness” that will keep the political press onboard the establishment train. Those issues will be in contrast with his almost maniacal adherence to the social conservative agenda in the Schiavo case and if he plays his cards right it’s possible he could neutralize his heresies. It will take skill and cunning he hasn’t heretofore demonstrated but you never know.

Where Bush has a more serious problem is in foreign policy and national security. Some of the reasons for that are more obvious than others. The most glaring, of course, is the fact that he’s George W. Bush’s brother. Despite what people say, W never lost the base of the party — that 28% approval rating he had at the end were the bitter-enders who loved him for his big swinging swagger. But he was unpopular with the very people the Big Money Boyz are banking on getting behind Jeb: independents and moderate Republicans. Aside from the obvious fact that Jeb doesn’t want to run against his own brother’s policies, he will have a big problem with the base if he strays too far from the right’s blood-thirsty foreign policy orthodoxy. But if he tacks too close a whole lot of normal Americans will instinctively recoil.

All the geniuses calling Jeb Bush the "moderate" candidate in the GOP primary are missing one thing: his history.

One of the more amusing aspects of he Republican establishment’s quest to anoint Jeb Bush as the “moderate” candidate who can bring all sides together is that the poor man is going to have to walk a tightrope made of dental floss over the next year or so — as he attempts to obscure his wingnutty past from the donor class, without alienating the right wingers he needs to vote for him. Managing these two competing constituencies is a difficult task for all the GOP presidential hopefuls, but Bush’s is perhaps the toughest.

There has been a lot of talk about how he will have to find a way to adequately explain his support for immigration reform and the Common Core education curriculum to the base, which loathes those two programs with a fervor they usually reserve for gay marriage and arugula. He seems to be picking his way through that and we’ll see soon enough if he still has the political chops he developed as Governor of Florida to successfully dogwhistle the base while offering a sheen of “reasonableness” that will keep the political press onboard the establishment train. Those issues will be in contrast with his almost maniacal adherence to the social conservative agenda in the Schiavo case and if he plays his cards right it’s possible he could neutralize his heresies. It will take skill and cunning he hasn’t heretofore demonstrated but you never know.

Where Bush has a more serious problem is in foreign policy and national security. Some of the reasons for that are more obvious than others. The most glaring, of course, is the fact that he’s George W. Bush’s brother. Despite what people say, W never lost the base of the party — that 28% approval rating he had at the end were the bitter-enders who loved him for his big swinging swagger. But he was unpopular with the very people the Big Money Boyz are banking on getting behind Jeb: independents and moderate Republicans. Aside from the obvious fact that Jeb doesn’t want to run against his own brother’s policies, he will have a big problem with the base if he strays too far from the right’s blood-thirsty foreign policy orthodoxy. But if he tacks too close a whole lot of normal Americans will instinctively recoil.

The announcement by Oregon’s four-term Democratic Governor, John Kitzhaber, that he will step down next week was quickly overtaken by the nationalmedia’s discovery that his successor, Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown, will be the first openly bisexual governor in U.S. history.

“An open LGBT governor has never been elected, although New Jersey did have an openly gay governor briefly in 2004, after Gov. Jim McGreevey (D) came out as gay and admitted an affair with a man he had appointed to a key job. He resigned three months later,” The Washington Post reported, also noting that “Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) became the first bisexual member of Congress in 2013.”

There are about 525 openly LGBT public officials in office at all levels of government, according to the Gay & Lesbian National Victory Fund. Most are Democrats, but about 20 are Republicans.

“Kate Brown will make history as the first openly bisexual American to become governor, and that makes us and the entire LGBT community extremely proud,” said Denis Dison, Victory Fund interim director. “More importantly for Oregonians, she’s a dedicated, passionate and impressive public servant who’s ready for this challenge. We believe in Kate Brown and her ability to lead Oregon through this difficult moment.”

Brown was first elected as a state legislator in 1991 and rose to become the Senate Majority leader before seeking statewide office. She was elected secretary of state in 2008 and reelected in 2012. Upon assuming office in 2009 she became the first openly bisexual statewide elected official in American history, according to the Victory Fund.

Brown has presided over several LGBT milestones in Oregon, including the arrival of marriage equality in May of 2014. Although she has been married to a man since 1997, she is widely seen in the LGBT community as a role model, speaking at many LGBT events and championing equal rights and equality.

The newspaper quoted a 2011 speech to the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, where Brown said, “I witnessed the difference it makes when our community not only has a seat at the table, but sits at the head of the table… because of my role as a caucus leader to set the agenda, we were able to make civil rights and civil unions a priority.”

Brown is not the only high-ranking LGBT political leader in Oregon. The state’s Speaker of the House, Tina Kotek, is a lesbian.

Brown will become governor next week because Gov. Kitzhaber could not tamp down an escalating scandal about his fiancee using his position to influence business deals. She will be in office as the U.S. Supreme Court this spring is expected to issue a nationwide ruling to legalize same-sex marriage. Because Oregon has no Lt.. governor, the secretary of state is second in line to a gubernatorial resignation.

As a state legislator, she was the lead sponsor of the state’s first domestic partnership law. She also led a statewide legislative effort to stop local governments from adopting anti-gay ballot measures. As secretary of state, Brown streamlined the state audit process and corporate licensing. She also implemented numerous efforts to expand the Oregon electorate—such as proactively identifying and contacting eligible voters—and has helped make its vote-by-mail system a model the many western states now follow.

These achievements come from her personal values, which Brown wrote about in the photographic book, Out and Elected in the USA: 1974-2004, where she recounts discovering and wrestling with her sexuality well into her 30s. She wrote:

“I believe it was during my early 30’s that I figured out who, or what, I am. But it wasn’t until it was written in the Oregonian newspaper that I was bisexual that I had to face the inevitable and let those around me know. Thus began my very public coming out as a bisexual:

“Coming out to my parents – who flew in from Minnesota “to have a talk.” Their response – “It would be much easier for us if you were a lesbian.”

“Coming out to my gay friends – who called me half-queer.

“Coming out to my straight friends – who never thought I could make up my mind about anything anyway.

“And, most frighteningly to me:

“Coming out to my legislative colleagues. At the beginning of the next legislative session sitting in the House lounge, representative Bill Markham, who is over 70 years old, extremely conservative, and a legislator for more than 20 years comes to join me. Over lunch he looks up to say, “Read in the Oregonian a few months ago you were bisexual. Guess that means I still have a chance?!”

“Some days I feel like I have a foot in both worlds, yet never really belonging to either.”

Starting next week, she will step into another role as Oregon’s next governor. However, Brown, a family lawyer by training who steadily rose in the state’s political world for 25 years, is as well prepared as any statewide politician for executive office.

“I feel really good about having her,” Webb told the Oregonian. “When I think about Salem, I think about Tina, and I think about Kate fighting the good fight, out there for us.”

The announcement by Oregon’s four-term Democratic Governor, John Kitzhaber, that he will step down next week was quickly overtaken by the nationalmedia’s discovery that his successor, Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown, will be the first openly bisexual governor in U.S. history.

“An open LGBT governor has never been elected, although New Jersey did have an openly gay governor briefly in 2004, after Gov. Jim McGreevey (D) came out as gay and admitted an affair with a man he had appointed to a key job. He resigned three months later,” The Washington Post reported, also noting that “Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) became the first bisexual member of Congress in 2013.”

There are about 525 openly LGBT public officials in office at all levels of government, according to the Gay & Lesbian National Victory Fund. Most are Democrats, but about 20 are Republicans.

“Kate Brown will make history as the first openly bisexual American to become governor, and that makes us and the entire LGBT community extremely proud,” said Denis Dison, Victory Fund interim director. “More importantly for Oregonians, she’s a dedicated, passionate and impressive public servant who’s ready for this challenge. We believe in Kate Brown and her ability to lead Oregon through this difficult moment.”

Brown was first elected as a state legislator in 1991 and rose to become the Senate Majority leader before seeking statewide office. She was elected secretary of state in 2008 and reelected in 2012. Upon assuming office in 2009 she became the first openly bisexual statewide elected official in American history, according to the Victory Fund.

Brown has presided over several LGBT milestones in Oregon, including the arrival of marriage equality in May of 2014. Although she has been married to a man since 1997, she is widely seen in the LGBT community as a role model, speaking at many LGBT events and championing equal rights and equality.

The newspaper quoted a 2011 speech to the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, where Brown said, “I witnessed the difference it makes when our community not only has a seat at the table, but sits at the head of the table… because of my role as a caucus leader to set the agenda, we were able to make civil rights and civil unions a priority.”

Brown is not the only high-ranking LGBT political leader in Oregon. The state’s Speaker of the House, Tina Kotek, is a lesbian.

Brown will become governor next week because Gov. Kitzhaber could not tamp down an escalating scandal about his fiancee using his position to influence business deals. She will be in office as the U.S. Supreme Court this spring is expected to issue a nationwide ruling to legalize same-sex marriage. Because Oregon has no Lt.. governor, the secretary of state is second in line to a gubernatorial resignation.

As a state legislator, she was the lead sponsor of the state’s first domestic partnership law. She also led a statewide legislative effort to stop local governments from adopting anti-gay ballot measures. As secretary of state, Brown streamlined the state audit process and corporate licensing. She also implemented numerous efforts to expand the Oregon electorate—such as proactively identifying and contacting eligible voters—and has helped make its vote-by-mail system a model the many western states now follow.

These achievements come from her personal values, which Brown wrote about in the photographic book, Out and Elected in the USA: 1974-2004, where she recounts discovering and wrestling with her sexuality well into her 30s. She wrote:

“I believe it was during my early 30’s that I figured out who, or what, I am. But it wasn’t until it was written in the Oregonian newspaper that I was bisexual that I had to face the inevitable and let those around me know. Thus began my very public coming out as a bisexual:

“Coming out to my parents – who flew in from Minnesota “to have a talk.” Their response – “It would be much easier for us if you were a lesbian.”

“Coming out to my gay friends – who called me half-queer.

“Coming out to my straight friends – who never thought I could make up my mind about anything anyway.

“And, most frighteningly to me:

“Coming out to my legislative colleagues. At the beginning of the next legislative session sitting in the House lounge, representative Bill Markham, who is over 70 years old, extremely conservative, and a legislator for more than 20 years comes to join me. Over lunch he looks up to say, “Read in the Oregonian a few months ago you were bisexual. Guess that means I still have a chance?!”

“Some days I feel like I have a foot in both worlds, yet never really belonging to either.”

Starting next week, she will step into another role as Oregon’s next governor. However, Brown, a family lawyer by training who steadily rose in the state’s political world for 25 years, is as well prepared as any statewide politician for executive office.

“I feel really good about having her,” Webb told the Oregonian. “When I think about Salem, I think about Tina, and I think about Kate fighting the good fight, out there for us.”

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback—an evangelical Christian who converted to Catholicism—is the latest right-wing Republican with a national reputation acting out this week to enforce discriminatory laws against LGBT people—in a desperate but despicable abuse of power.

On Tuesday, Brownback issued executive orders abolishing nine state task forces that oversaw a range of social, educational and environmental programs created by former Kansas Democratic governor, Kathleen Sebelius. But he also revoked Sebelius’ 2007 executive order that extended employment discrimination protections to LGBT people who are state employees. Sebelius told state agencies to create workplace policies to prevent harassment against LGBT employees.

“This Executive Order ensures that state employees enjoy the same civil rights as all Kansans without creating additional ‘protected classes’ as the previous order did,” Brownback said. “Any such expansion of ‘protected classes’ should be done by the legislature and not through unilateral action. The order also reaffirms our commitment to hiring, mentoring and recognizing veterans and individuals with disabilities.”

What makes Brownback’s statement so pernicious—if not Orwellian—is that Kansas has intentionally not included LGBT discrimination in its civil rights laws for decades. In other words, with rare exceptions such as Sebelius’ executive actions for state employees—Kansas law has intentionally left LGBT individuals as an unprotected class, where there is no legal recourse for getting fired or treated as a second-class citizen in the workplace.

The ongoing litigation for same-sex equality in Kansas concerns marriage licenses and income tax status, however there are hundreds of areas of state law where LGBT people are treated unequally, usually by intentional omission. For example, there is no way for a LGBT couple married in another state to get a drivers’ license with the same last name. There are similar barriers with adoption, housing, medical power of attorney and many other areas affecting daily life.

What Brownback is doing is not unlike the protests this week by Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who told judges in his state to ignore the U.S. Supreme Court’s order to issue marriage license to LGBT couples. It is also similar to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s comments in the ruling that told Alabama to issue the marriage licenses, where Thomas said the high court should respect states’ rights to not recognize same-sex marriage until the Supreme Court decides the issue.

But Brownback’s actions are more akin to Germany in the early 1930s, where the ruling National Socialists meticulously revoked the civil rights of various minority groups, most notably Jews. Make no mistake Brownback is rolling back civil right protections for LGBT Kansans.

“This action by the governor is an outrage,” Tom Witt, Kansas Equality’s executive director, told local newspapers. “Gay, lesbian, and transgender state employees across Kansas have trusted they would be safe from discrimination and harassment in their workplace, but Sam Brownback has, by erasing their job protections, declared ‘open season’ on every one of them.”

Witt is not exaggerating. When reporting for AlterNet last fall on the Kansas equality struggle, several of people who put their names on one state lawsuit challenging the state’s discriminatory tax code—which does not recognize LGBT couples—said they felt they could join this legal fight because they were state employees who were protected against retaliation or losing their jobs.

On Tuesday, Brownback took away that protection. It may be that his moves, like the pronouncements by Moore and Thomas, are last-gasp efforts in the face of a cultural tidal wave that is bringing equality to all 50 states. But when reactionaries like these go down fighting, there can be collateral damage—individuals whose lives can be unnecessarily disrupted and hurt.

For more on this important story, read AlterNet's two-part series on the Kansas Equality movement. Part I traces the history of LGBT discrimination in the state.Part II tells the stories of several LGBT Kansans who have persevered despite living in a state where social conservatives still demonize them.The series was supported by the American Independent Institute.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback—an evangelical Christian who converted to Catholicism—is the latest right-wing Republican with a national reputation acting out this week to enforce discriminatory laws against LGBT people—in a desperate but despicable abuse of power.

On Tuesday, Brownback issued executive orders abolishing nine state task forces that oversaw a range of social, educational and environmental programs created by former Kansas Democratic governor, Kathleen Sebelius. But he also revoked Sebelius’ 2007 executive order that extended employment discrimination protections to LGBT people who are state employees. Sebelius told state agencies to create workplace policies to prevent harassment against LGBT employees.

“This Executive Order ensures that state employees enjoy the same civil rights as all Kansans without creating additional ‘protected classes’ as the previous order did,” Brownback said. “Any such expansion of ‘protected classes’ should be done by the legislature and not through unilateral action. The order also reaffirms our commitment to hiring, mentoring and recognizing veterans and individuals with disabilities.”

What makes Brownback’s statement so pernicious—if not Orwellian—is that Kansas has intentionally not included LGBT discrimination in its civil rights laws for decades. In other words, with rare exceptions such as Sebelius’ executive actions for state employees—Kansas law has intentionally left LGBT individuals as an unprotected class, where there is no legal recourse for getting fired or treated as a second-class citizen in the workplace.

The ongoing litigation for same-sex equality in Kansas concerns marriage licenses and income tax status, however there are hundreds of areas of state law where LGBT people are treated unequally, usually by intentional omission. For example, there is no way for a LGBT couple married in another state to get a drivers’ license with the same last name. There are similar barriers with adoption, housing, medical power of attorney and many other areas affecting daily life.

What Brownback is doing is not unlike the protests this week by Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who told judges in his state to ignore the U.S. Supreme Court’s order to issue marriage license to LGBT couples. It is also similar to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s comments in the ruling that told Alabama to issue the marriage licenses, where Thomas said the high court should respect states’ rights to not recognize same-sex marriage until the Supreme Court decides the issue.

But Brownback’s actions are more akin to Germany in the early 1930s, where the ruling National Socialists meticulously revoked the civil rights of various minority groups, most notably Jews. Make no mistake Brownback is rolling back civil right protections for LGBT Kansans.

“This action by the governor is an outrage,” Tom Witt, Kansas Equality’s executive director, told local newspapers. “Gay, lesbian, and transgender state employees across Kansas have trusted they would be safe from discrimination and harassment in their workplace, but Sam Brownback has, by erasing their job protections, declared ‘open season’ on every one of them.”

Witt is not exaggerating. When reporting for AlterNet last fall on the Kansas equality struggle, several of people who put their names on one state lawsuit challenging the state’s discriminatory tax code—which does not recognize LGBT couples—said they felt they could join this legal fight because they were state employees who were protected against retaliation or losing their jobs.

On Tuesday, Brownback took away that protection. It may be that his moves, like the pronouncements by Moore and Thomas, are last-gasp efforts in the face of a cultural tidal wave that is bringing equality to all 50 states. But when reactionaries like these go down fighting, there can be collateral damage—individuals whose lives can be unnecessarily disrupted and hurt.

For more on this important story, read AlterNet's two-part series on the Kansas Equality movement. Part I traces the history of LGBT discrimination in the state.Part II tells the stories of several LGBT Kansans who have persevered despite living in a state where social conservatives still demonize them.The series was supported by the American Independent Institute.

Radical right-wingers in a series of red states are punishing hundreds of thousands of low-income people by blocking efforts by Republican governors to expand Medicaid—state-run health care—by modifying Obamacare to include Republican ideas.

Last week, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam’s alternative plan to expand Medicaid to an estimated 250,000 uninsured adults died in a state Senate committee after opponents with deep ties to the Koch brothers won a 7-4 vote. Haslam, chair of the Republican Governors Association, included GOP proposals like creating health reimbursement accounts to help individuals pay for out-of-pocket expenses, premiums and co-pays. Tennessee’s Hospital Association, Business Roundtable and Medical Association all supported his reforms, yet senior GOP legislators fell under the libertarian extremists’ spell that the federal government could not be trusted with its funds or red tape.

“We’re the third-worst state in the country for accepting federal dollars,” Andrew Ogles, Americans for Prosperity’s state director said during the debate. “It’s time for us to stop. Anytime we have a problem, instead of coming up with a Tennessee solution, we run to the federal government with our hands out. No more.”

Of course, the clamor for a state-based solution—a talking point repeatedly cited by Tea Partiers across the country who oppose Medicaid expansion—is no solution at all. It is a return to the status quo where thousands upon thousands lack reliable health care.

That dynamic could be seen in the anti-Obamacare crusade that last week also lead to the death of Wyoming’s Medicaid expansion bill, which was supported by Republican Gov. Matt Mead and would have helped more than 17,000 low-income residents. That bill’s demise also occurred in the early legislative process. Right-wing activists told lawmakers that many had won office opposing Obamacare. It didn’t matter that the bill’s sponsors created a “revenue-neutral proposal,” as Senate President Phil Nicholas said after its defeat, responding to critics who said it would lead to fiscal doomsday.

“While I respect different views, the fact is today we are left with working poor without coverage,” Gov. Mead said, after the naysayers blocked legislation, underscoring there are no ready state-based solutions to the problem of providing health care for the poor.

So far in 2015, Indiana—where Republican Gov. Mike Pence is eyeing a presidential run—has been the only red state to expand its Medicaid program under Obamacare, making it the 28th state to do so. But Pence added conditions that federal regulators grudgingly approved—allowing it to “to lock residents out of the program for six months if they fail to pay premiums,” according to Advisory.com’s summary. Still, 350,000 previously uninsured state residents will now have access to health care.

Meanwhile, AFP has been threatening lawmakers in other states where Medicaid expansion is being considered. Take Montana, where Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock wants to help 70,000 residents. At grassroots meetings, AFP organizers have been threatening Republican legislators who refuse to sign no-expansion pledge cards. “Part of the reason we are doing this is because some legislators are not acting like adults in the Capitol,” Montana AFP Director Zach Lahn told the Great Falls Tribune, before absurdly adding that AFP was not engaged in electoral politics but public education.

In Utah, Gov. Gary Herbert wants to expand Medicaid to help 90,000 state residents. The Salt Lake Tribune reported there are competing GOP plans, where the sticking point is how many people will get covered. Tennessee, Wyoming and Utah are the three states that were being most closely watched in 2015 for possible Medicaid expansion. There are similar debates in other red states, such as Idaho and Alaska, but advocates are not optimistic.

Meanwhile, there are other worries on the Medicaid front. In other states, such as Ohio, there are GOP-led efforts to possibly roll back Medicaid expansion or impose conditions that would take away coverage from large numbers of people. Last Friday, Ohio sent letters to 107,000 Medicaid recipients telling them they could lose their coverage by Feb. 28 unless they verified their incomes.

The Columbus Dispatch reported that 500,000 Ohians will receive similar notices in the next six months. The state has 2.9 million Medicaid recipients, including 450,000 who were added last year when Republican Gov. John Kasich expanded the program. He’s been criticized by the same cadre of right-wingers blocking expansion in other states.

In Arkansas, Republican legislators decided to fund their expansion for another two years, which helps recipients buy private health plans. Meanwhile, in Illinois, the newly elected Republican governor is said to be eyeing a Medicaid roll-back, citing higher than expected near-term costs.

While it is not a surprise that the Republican war on Obamacare continues, it is new to see a handful of Republican governors push for Medicaid expansion while the GOP's Koch wing is essentially intimidating state lawmakers into voting no. That suggests there might be a growing split in the party as 2016 looms on the horizon and presidential candidates acknowledge inequality is an issue.

In the short run, however, those political currents do nothing for poor people who can't get the health care they need, or might lose recently acquired coverage, such as in Ohio, should the state mistakenly send their renewal paperwork to wrong addresses.

]]>
Mon, 09 Feb 2015 11:50:00 -0800Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet1031594 at http://www.alternet.orgTea Party and the RightEconomyElection 2014News & PoliticsTea Party and the Rightmedicaid expansionobamacareKoch Party

Tennessee, Wyoming blocked. Utah, Montana may be next.

Radical right-wingers in a series of red states are punishing hundreds of thousands of low-income people by blocking efforts by Republican governors to expand Medicaid—state-run health care—by modifying Obamacare to include Republican ideas.

Last week, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam’s alternative plan to expand Medicaid to an estimated 250,000 uninsured adults died in a state Senate committee after opponents with deep ties to the Koch brothers won a 7-4 vote. Haslam, chair of the Republican Governors Association, included GOP proposals like creating health reimbursement accounts to help individuals pay for out-of-pocket expenses, premiums and co-pays. Tennessee’s Hospital Association, Business Roundtable and Medical Association all supported his reforms, yet senior GOP legislators fell under the libertarian extremists’ spell that the federal government could not be trusted with its funds or red tape.

“We’re the third-worst state in the country for accepting federal dollars,” Andrew Ogles, Americans for Prosperity’s state director said during the debate. “It’s time for us to stop. Anytime we have a problem, instead of coming up with a Tennessee solution, we run to the federal government with our hands out. No more.”

Of course, the clamor for a state-based solution—a talking point repeatedly cited by Tea Partiers across the country who oppose Medicaid expansion—is no solution at all. It is a return to the status quo where thousands upon thousands lack reliable health care.

That dynamic could be seen in the anti-Obamacare crusade that last week also lead to the death of Wyoming’s Medicaid expansion bill, which was supported by Republican Gov. Matt Mead and would have helped more than 17,000 low-income residents. That bill’s demise also occurred in the early legislative process. Right-wing activists told lawmakers that many had won office opposing Obamacare. It didn’t matter that the bill’s sponsors created a “revenue-neutral proposal,” as Senate President Phil Nicholas said after its defeat, responding to critics who said it would lead to fiscal doomsday.

“While I respect different views, the fact is today we are left with working poor without coverage,” Gov. Mead said, after the naysayers blocked legislation, underscoring there are no ready state-based solutions to the problem of providing health care for the poor.

So far in 2015, Indiana—where Republican Gov. Mike Pence is eyeing a presidential run—has been the only red state to expand its Medicaid program under Obamacare, making it the 28th state to do so. But Pence added conditions that federal regulators grudgingly approved—allowing it to “to lock residents out of the program for six months if they fail to pay premiums,” according to Advisory.com’s summary. Still, 350,000 previously uninsured state residents will now have access to health care.

Meanwhile, AFP has been threatening lawmakers in other states where Medicaid expansion is being considered. Take Montana, where Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock wants to help 70,000 residents. At grassroots meetings, AFP organizers have been threatening Republican legislators who refuse to sign no-expansion pledge cards. “Part of the reason we are doing this is because some legislators are not acting like adults in the Capitol,” Montana AFP Director Zach Lahn told the Great Falls Tribune, before absurdly adding that AFP was not engaged in electoral politics but public education.

In Utah, Gov. Gary Herbert wants to expand Medicaid to help 90,000 state residents. The Salt Lake Tribune reported there are competing GOP plans, where the sticking point is how many people will get covered. Tennessee, Wyoming and Utah are the three states that were being most closely watched in 2015 for possible Medicaid expansion. There are similar debates in other red states, such as Idaho and Alaska, but advocates are not optimistic.

Meanwhile, there are other worries on the Medicaid front. In other states, such as Ohio, there are GOP-led efforts to possibly roll back Medicaid expansion or impose conditions that would take away coverage from large numbers of people. Last Friday, Ohio sent letters to 107,000 Medicaid recipients telling them they could lose their coverage by Feb. 28 unless they verified their incomes.

The Columbus Dispatch reported that 500,000 Ohians will receive similar notices in the next six months. The state has 2.9 million Medicaid recipients, including 450,000 who were added last year when Republican Gov. John Kasich expanded the program. He’s been criticized by the same cadre of right-wingers blocking expansion in other states.

In Arkansas, Republican legislators decided to fund their expansion for another two years, which helps recipients buy private health plans. Meanwhile, in Illinois, the newly elected Republican governor is said to be eyeing a Medicaid roll-back, citing higher than expected near-term costs.

While it is not a surprise that the Republican war on Obamacare continues, it is new to see a handful of Republican governors push for Medicaid expansion while the GOP's Koch wing is essentially intimidating state lawmakers into voting no. That suggests there might be a growing split in the party as 2016 looms on the horizon and presidential candidates acknowledge inequality is an issue.

In the short run, however, those political currents do nothing for poor people who can't get the health care they need, or might lose recently acquired coverage, such as in Ohio, should the state mistakenly send their renewal paperwork to wrong addresses.

]]>
http://www.alternet.org/election-2014/president-obamas-2016-budget-not-middle-class-manifestoPresident Obama's 2016 Budget Is Not A Middle-Class Manifestohttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/84897427/0/alternet_election2012~President-Obamas-Budget-Is-Not-A-MiddleClass-Manifesto

The White House floats cuts to Social Security cost of living increases.

“Meet the new prez, same as the old prez.”

That bastardization of an old lyric by The Who promptly popped into my head upon learning this week that the White House is again floating the “chained CPI” as a means to whittle down its benefits obligations, through Social Security as well as other programs. Little more than two weeks earlier, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who had been working closely with the White House on its fiscal-2016 budget, said President Obama had assured him that the budget would not contain the controversial change, which would apply a stringier formula to the cost-of-living adjustments Washington makes every year.

Yet here's what White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday: “We’re certainly open to that conversation with Republicans if they want to have a genuine conversation about strengthening Social Security. But frankly, we’ve not gotten a lot of serious willingness on the part of Republicans to engage in that conversation.”

Maybe not—and in any case, the chained CPI is mentioned nowhere in the budget that the White House submitted to Congress this week. But the fact that Obama told Sanders one thing about this very sensitive matter, which could greatly reduced benefits for everyone from Social Security recipients to military and civil service retirees to food stamp recipients—some 80 million people, all told—and then apparently put it back on the table, illustrates an important point about presidential budgets: they are bargaining chips, not blueprints.

The budget is the only matter before Congress that lawmakers—and the president—really have to act on every year, even if they do so in a chaotic and piecemeal fashion. But the numbers and the principles behind the budget, once they hit the hard reality of closed-door conferences where decisions finally get hammered out, are malleable. Anything goes.

Obama's budget, like every president's, tells us what he would like us to think he wants—and no more. This year, his party's progressive wing of his party is applauding him for producing a budget that, the White House says “lays out a strategy to strengthen our middle class.”

The storyline here is that, with no more elections to fight, Obama is liberated from the need to pacify the deficit hawks and can now fight for the progressive vision he always held. The proof is that the chained CPI isn't in the budget (oops), and that it calls for rescuing the trust fund for Disability Insurance by shifting funds from Social Security's Old Age and Survivors Insurance fund, rather than attacking benefits, as congressional Republicans would prefer. In fact, Obama makes no proposals to “reform” Social Security at all. Obama is, at last, “un-chained."

Not exactly. “It's a mixed bag,” Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, says of the president's budget. “The irony is that the elements that are the most bold and progressive are the ones with the dimmest chance of passing, while the weakest stuff is where there could be some negotiation with the GOP.”

On the positive side, Obama lays out a plan to raise at least $1.5 trillion in new taxes over 10 years by—among other things—boosting the capital gains tax rate of the wealthiest households from 23.8% to 28% and applying a separate capital-gains levy to some inheritances. He would lower the corporate tax rate from 35% to 28% (25% for manufacturers), apply a minimum 19% tax to profits that American companies keep overseas, and slap a one-time, 14% tax on profits that they repatriate from foreign countries. Revenues on that one-time charge—estimated at $268 billion over ten years—would be used to rebuild infrastructure at home.

At the other end of the income scale, Obama would expand the tax credit for child care, create a new tax credit for two-earner households, and require employers to offer participation in their retirement plans to any worker who puts in at least 500 hours a year for three years. That would give an additional 1 million workers access to employer-based plans like 401(k)s. In another move to encourage saving by people with no regular employment, the president is also asking for $6.5 million for a pilot project that would help states to set up their own individual retirement accounts with automatic enrollment or 401(k)-type accounts.

Whatever his longer-term intentions toward Social Security, the president's budget would expand it by allowing lawfully married same-sex couples to receive benefits regardless of where they live. Currently, if they live in a state that doesn't recognize same-sex marriage, they get nothing. This is an important step toward making gay marriages equal to heterosexual marriages. Obama is also asking for a $707 million increase in the Social Security Administration's operating budget. This would enable it to reverse the cuts in hours at local offices that have made it harder for the SSA to serve beneficiaries—many of them elderly or disabled—and reduce the backlogs of pending hearings on disability benefits.

What kind of tax system do we want?

The hard-core Republican congressional leadership will no doubt oppose these measures for the less affluent, but cost-wise, they amount to peanuts. The critical issue is whether Obama really means it when he says he wants to make the tax system—distorted by decades of Reagan- and Bush-administered “reforms” and riddled with loopholes for the 1%—more progressive. There are many reasons to be skeptical. That new, 19% tax rate on foreign profits is supposed to make it less onerous for American companies to bring their money home, generating more tax revenues. That goes a little in the right direction—but not very far.

“We should take the bias out of the system that favors companies taking their assets overseas,” says Bivens. “For that, we would just apply the US corporate tax rate to any earnings wherever received, with no deferral for leaving there, as at present. Given that this issue very much in play, I wish the president had been bolder.” Revamping corporate taxes is one of the areas where Washington insiders see the potential for an Obama deal with the Republican, however. Since the Republicans' longtime ambition has been to eliminate all taxation on companies' foreign earnings, going to the conference table arguing for a 19% rate “is not a very strong opening bid,” Bivens says.

It's another ominous sign that Obama caved almost instantly to demands that he reinstate a tax benefit for 529 college savings accounts after congressional leaders—including, in an unusual tag-team effort, Boehner and Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi—applied pressure. As Rep. Chris Van Hollen, ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, put it, “This particular proposal undercuts the message that they were focused on helping the middle class.”

Yet about 80% of benefits from 529 plans go to households with incomes above $150,000 and 70% to households making more than $200,000 (http://www.offthechartsblog.org/obamas-education-tax-proposals-a-big-step-forward/). And it's not as though Obama was proposing to wipe out the plans. Assets could continue to accrue tax-free; savers would only pay taxes when they withdraw funds, just as with 401(k)s. As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities toldNew York Timesblogger Thomas Edsall, “The implications of this debacle are troubling. If we can’t reform a tax break that is highly inefficient and gives the overwhelming share of its benefits to high-income people who don’t need the benefits to engage in the desired activity (in this case, going to college) … then it’s going to be awfully difficult to address a number of the challenges the nation faces in the years ahead.”

Just as troubling, the White House wants to means-test Medicare by raising premiums for individuals with higher incomes and adding a premium surcharge for new beneficiaries who buy Medigap coverage—changes that would shift some $70 billion of costs from Medicare to individuals over 10 years. The budget also would add a copayment for home health care—adding to the burden faced by families with aging relatives. “But more affluent people already pay substantially higher premiums,” says Bivens at EPI, “and especially with projected health care costs already really slowing down, the idea that we continue to need to talk about premium fixes just isn't convincing.”

Regarding Social Security, the president hasn't got the message, either. While much of his party—including Sanders, now the ranking member of the Seate Finance Committee—advocate expanding the program, Obama is again toying with the idea of cutting it. His notion of how to help working households concerned about their ability to retire in comfort, instead, is to some modest moves to encourage IRA and 401(k) savings.

What remains to be seen is which elements of his budget are there merely to appeal to the working households Obama has so often ignored, and which ones could form the basis of a budget deal with the GOP. Republican leaders have been tossing hints for weeks that a deal on corporate taxes may be possible, suggesting the president's proposals for taxation of foreign profits—weak as they are—may be a starting point for negotiations. The fact that he's proposing to pass on more costs to Medicare recipients, and is placing the chained CPI back on the table, signals that a deal to cut Social Security and Medicare may not out of the question either. We already know that Obama and the GOP leadership see eye-to-eye on NAFTA-like trade deals in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, even if many lawmakers of both parties—and the public—oppose them.

Maybe the president's budget is a middle-class manifesto. But that may only be what he wants us to think.

The White House floats cuts to Social Security cost of living increases.

“Meet the new prez, same as the old prez.”

That bastardization of an old lyric by The Who promptly popped into my head upon learning this week that the White House is again floating the “chained CPI” as a means to whittle down its benefits obligations, through Social Security as well as other programs. Little more than two weeks earlier, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who had been working closely with the White House on its fiscal-2016 budget, said President Obama had assured him that the budget would not contain the controversial change, which would apply a stringier formula to the cost-of-living adjustments Washington makes every year.

Yet here's what White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday: “We’re certainly open to that conversation with Republicans if they want to have a genuine conversation about strengthening Social Security. But frankly, we’ve not gotten a lot of serious willingness on the part of Republicans to engage in that conversation.”

Maybe not—and in any case, the chained CPI is mentioned nowhere in the budget that the White House submitted to Congress this week. But the fact that Obama told Sanders one thing about this very sensitive matter, which could greatly reduced benefits for everyone from Social Security recipients to military and civil service retirees to food stamp recipients—some 80 million people, all told—and then apparently put it back on the table, illustrates an important point about presidential budgets: they are bargaining chips, not blueprints.

The budget is the only matter before Congress that lawmakers—and the president—really have to act on every year, even if they do so in a chaotic and piecemeal fashion. But the numbers and the principles behind the budget, once they hit the hard reality of closed-door conferences where decisions finally get hammered out, are malleable. Anything goes.

Obama's budget, like every president's, tells us what he would like us to think he wants—and no more. This year, his party's progressive wing of his party is applauding him for producing a budget that, the White House says “lays out a strategy to strengthen our middle class.”

The storyline here is that, with no more elections to fight, Obama is liberated from the need to pacify the deficit hawks and can now fight for the progressive vision he always held. The proof is that the chained CPI isn't in the budget (oops), and that it calls for rescuing the trust fund for Disability Insurance by shifting funds from Social Security's Old Age and Survivors Insurance fund, rather than attacking benefits, as congressional Republicans would prefer. In fact, Obama makes no proposals to “reform” Social Security at all. Obama is, at last, “un-chained."

Not exactly. “It's a mixed bag,” Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, says of the president's budget. “The irony is that the elements that are the most bold and progressive are the ones with the dimmest chance of passing, while the weakest stuff is where there could be some negotiation with the GOP.”

On the positive side, Obama lays out a plan to raise at least $1.5 trillion in new taxes over 10 years by—among other things—boosting the capital gains tax rate of the wealthiest households from 23.8% to 28% and applying a separate capital-gains levy to some inheritances. He would lower the corporate tax rate from 35% to 28% (25% for manufacturers), apply a minimum 19% tax to profits that American companies keep overseas, and slap a one-time, 14% tax on profits that they repatriate from foreign countries. Revenues on that one-time charge—estimated at $268 billion over ten years—would be used to rebuild infrastructure at home.

At the other end of the income scale, Obama would expand the tax credit for child care, create a new tax credit for two-earner households, and require employers to offer participation in their retirement plans to any worker who puts in at least 500 hours a year for three years. That would give an additional 1 million workers access to employer-based plans like 401(k)s. In another move to encourage saving by people with no regular employment, the president is also asking for $6.5 million for a pilot project that would help states to set up their own individual retirement accounts with automatic enrollment or 401(k)-type accounts.

Whatever his longer-term intentions toward Social Security, the president's budget would expand it by allowing lawfully married same-sex couples to receive benefits regardless of where they live. Currently, if they live in a state that doesn't recognize same-sex marriage, they get nothing. This is an important step toward making gay marriages equal to heterosexual marriages. Obama is also asking for a $707 million increase in the Social Security Administration's operating budget. This would enable it to reverse the cuts in hours at local offices that have made it harder for the SSA to serve beneficiaries—many of them elderly or disabled—and reduce the backlogs of pending hearings on disability benefits.

What kind of tax system do we want?

The hard-core Republican congressional leadership will no doubt oppose these measures for the less affluent, but cost-wise, they amount to peanuts. The critical issue is whether Obama really means it when he says he wants to make the tax system—distorted by decades of Reagan- and Bush-administered “reforms” and riddled with loopholes for the 1%—more progressive. There are many reasons to be skeptical. That new, 19% tax rate on foreign profits is supposed to make it less onerous for American companies to bring their money home, generating more tax revenues. That goes a little in the right direction—but not very far.

“We should take the bias out of the system that favors companies taking their assets overseas,” says Bivens. “For that, we would just apply the US corporate tax rate to any earnings wherever received, with no deferral for leaving there, as at present. Given that this issue very much in play, I wish the president had been bolder.” Revamping corporate taxes is one of the areas where Washington insiders see the potential for an Obama deal with the Republican, however. Since the Republicans' longtime ambition has been to eliminate all taxation on companies' foreign earnings, going to the conference table arguing for a 19% rate “is not a very strong opening bid,” Bivens says.

It's another ominous sign that Obama caved almost instantly to demands that he reinstate a tax benefit for 529 college savings accounts after congressional leaders—including, in an unusual tag-team effort, Boehner and Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi—applied pressure. As Rep. Chris Van Hollen, ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, put it, “This particular proposal undercuts the message that they were focused on helping the middle class.”

Yet about 80% of benefits from 529 plans go to households with incomes above $150,000 and 70% to households making more than $200,000 (http://www.offthechartsblog.org/obamas-education-tax-proposals-a-big-step-forward/). And it's not as though Obama was proposing to wipe out the plans. Assets could continue to accrue tax-free; savers would only pay taxes when they withdraw funds, just as with 401(k)s. As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities toldNew York Timesblogger Thomas Edsall, “The implications of this debacle are troubling. If we can’t reform a tax break that is highly inefficient and gives the overwhelming share of its benefits to high-income people who don’t need the benefits to engage in the desired activity (in this case, going to college) … then it’s going to be awfully difficult to address a number of the challenges the nation faces in the years ahead.”

Just as troubling, the White House wants to means-test Medicare by raising premiums for individuals with higher incomes and adding a premium surcharge for new beneficiaries who buy Medigap coverage—changes that would shift some $70 billion of costs from Medicare to individuals over 10 years. The budget also would add a copayment for home health care—adding to the burden faced by families with aging relatives. “But more affluent people already pay substantially higher premiums,” says Bivens at EPI, “and especially with projected health care costs already really slowing down, the idea that we continue to need to talk about premium fixes just isn't convincing.”

Regarding Social Security, the president hasn't got the message, either. While much of his party—including Sanders, now the ranking member of the Seate Finance Committee—advocate expanding the program, Obama is again toying with the idea of cutting it. His notion of how to help working households concerned about their ability to retire in comfort, instead, is to some modest moves to encourage IRA and 401(k) savings.

What remains to be seen is which elements of his budget are there merely to appeal to the working households Obama has so often ignored, and which ones could form the basis of a budget deal with the GOP. Republican leaders have been tossing hints for weeks that a deal on corporate taxes may be possible, suggesting the president's proposals for taxation of foreign profits—weak as they are—may be a starting point for negotiations. The fact that he's proposing to pass on more costs to Medicare recipients, and is placing the chained CPI back on the table, signals that a deal to cut Social Security and Medicare may not out of the question either. We already know that Obama and the GOP leadership see eye-to-eye on NAFTA-like trade deals in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, even if many lawmakers of both parties—and the public—oppose them.

Maybe the president's budget is a middle-class manifesto. But that may only be what he wants us to think.

One week after Scott Walker was re-elected as Wisconsin’s Republican governor last fall, he told Fox News something he surely doesn’t want to hear now: that in “the past four or five” presidential elections, “people who poll high at the beginning are not the people who end up being the nominees.”

This week, as pundits like the New York Times’ David Leonhardt are giving great weight to Walker’s rising appeal in polls among Republicans in 2016’s early caucus and primary states (he is leading in polls in Iowa and New Hampshire), it is worth recalling what Walker said, because it still holds true for the crowded GOP field.

There's no denying Wallker has ruled Wisconsin like a thug, bullying unions, public employees, protesters, pro-abortion and gun-control, and winning a special recall election against a lackluster Democrat and re-election last fall. This makes him especially scary to progressives who have watched him consolidate power.

But a long view of GOP presidential primaries supports exactly what Walker told Fox and Friends last November. It’s not just that there's been endless polling among the GOP hopefuls all last year and would-be candidates such as Rand Paul, Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee have all been in the lead—when the race is all about linng up donors and endorsements. More pointedly, the busiest Republican presidential contests in recent decades have been filled with mavericks who won in early states but ended up where most of them started—back on the air as right-wing broadcasters or serving in the U.S. Senate.

It's easy to forget this. Take Iowa, for example. Rick Santorum won its GOP caucuses in 2012 and Mike Huckabee won in 2008. Or New Hampshire, where John McCain won the GOP primary in 2000 and Pat Buchanan won in 1996. Or South Carolina, the third major contest state in 2012, where Newt Gingrich won. All of these candidates won a handful of states in those years, but not the Republican nomination or even the vice-presidential nomination.

Their campaigns fizzled for a mix of reasons. They were too ideological as they moved to more populous urban states. Or they were not embraced by the GOP establishment. Or they ran out of money and weren't organized in the next state as the race continued. Or they stumbled, or their protest vote vanished, or doubts among the public crept in. For different reasons, voters did not think these Republican rebels were ready for prime time—other than returning to their pundit roles or lower elected office.

There are many reasons to heed Walker's words about not putting too much stock in early front-runners—including himself.

The latest polls suggest he might do well in Iowa a year from now—but even that is not a foregone conclusion as its state Republican Party, the New York Times reported Friday, has been undergoing “a purge, recruiting Republican activists to replace the libertarians and Christian conservatives who had taken over the party.” Walker's feet are firmly planted in those two factions.

The beneficiary of any swing to the center in Iowa is likely ex-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. But even if Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad doesn’t sweep the crazies out of the room, the 30,000-40,000 voters he needs to win the state's caucuses are not representative of most Republicans who vote later in the process, especially in larger blue states. Iowa is not where Republican presidential nominations are locked up. That typically comes after a dozen contests, unless a Republican president is seeking re-election.

So what we’re left with in these early states is frequently well-hyped ado that ends up being about nothing. Take Santorum, who in 2012 won in Iowa, lost the next five states in a row, and then won consecutively in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri. He was trounced by Mitt Romney's sweep of big states. Does anybody recall that Santorum won 11 mostly red rural states in 2012?

Santorum beat Mitt Romney in Iowa by 34 votes, followed by Texas Congressman Ron Paul, the libertarian father of 2016’s GOP contender Rand Paul. The fact that 57 percent of Iowa Republicans say they are evangelical Christians goes a long way to explain Santorum's early results. Looking to 2016, Walker checks those same boxes. His father is a preacher. He grew up in Iowa until the third grade. He proudly touts his rural roots.

When it comes to New Hampshire, Walker also could appeal to that state’s flinty rural Republicans, who are cut from a recalcitrant, leave-me-alone cloth. They are the "Live Free or Die" types, as the state's license plate proclaims, but beyond that bit of old New England vanity, they have little in common with Republicans in the state’s populous southeast corner, which is a Boston suburb, where establishment Republicans, like Romney in 2012 and possibly Jeb Bush, prevail.

What might make Walker attractive in these early contests could easily work against him as the primaries progress. His negatives are substantial. He is best known for his union-bashing victories and mockery of thousands of protesters, his anti-abortion and anti-gun control stances. He’s a college dropout and targeted in an active state-level corruption probe, in which several of his top aides have already pleaded guilty to charges.

There’s another important factor that isn’t tracked in polls. Walker isn’t quite like Rand Paul, or Mike Huckabee, or Newt Gingrich, or other candidates who have been perpetually running for president. But his latest speeches have been brimming with grandiosity, bragging about being both the bully (taking on unions) and victim (of death threats by pro-union protesters), which might appeal to libertarian right-wingers and the Koch brothers, but there is an unruly quality about it that isn’t very presidential.

Walker also doesn’t have the experience of the Bush or Clinton clan, who have run repeated presidential campaigns—including losing the nomination (Hillary in 2008) and re-election (George Herbert Walker Bush in 1992). These political dynasties have come to know each important state’s vanities, how to sew up their party’s establishment, how to time their campaigns so they don’t peak too soon. That’s what Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are primarily engaged in today—the backroom work—and why Hillary won’t make any announcements until this summer.

Hillary Clinton knows, as 2008 taught her, that you can lose an early lead. Walker said the same thing on Fox last November. There’s many reasons why progressives should be concerned about Walker's rise—he is the Koch party's waterboy—but not overreact to his new momentum, especially as one of his latest talking points is bragging that he's the guy liberals love to hate.

A final statistic bears out that popularity in a few states is not the same as nationwide appeal. When averaging the results of all the GOP presidential polls taken between November 18 and January 27, RealClearPolitics.com found that Jeb Bush lead with 16.4 percent. Walker was sixth, with only 5.8 percent. The political pendulum might have swung toward Walker in recent polls in early states, but chances are strong it will keep shifting in coming months.

It's still a long way to 2016's first nominating contests, and a long way between the opening votes and choosing the nominee.

One week after Scott Walker was re-elected as Wisconsin’s Republican governor last fall, he told Fox News something he surely doesn’t want to hear now: that in “the past four or five” presidential elections, “people who poll high at the beginning are not the people who end up being the nominees.”

This week, as pundits like the New York Times’ David Leonhardt are giving great weight to Walker’s rising appeal in polls among Republicans in 2016’s early caucus and primary states (he is leading in polls in Iowa and New Hampshire), it is worth recalling what Walker said, because it still holds true for the crowded GOP field.

There's no denying Wallker has ruled Wisconsin like a thug, bullying unions, public employees, protesters, pro-abortion and gun-control, and winning a special recall election against a lackluster Democrat and re-election last fall. This makes him especially scary to progressives who have watched him consolidate power.

But a long view of GOP presidential primaries supports exactly what Walker told Fox and Friends last November. It’s not just that there's been endless polling among the GOP hopefuls all last year and would-be candidates such as Rand Paul, Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee have all been in the lead—when the race is all about linng up donors and endorsements. More pointedly, the busiest Republican presidential contests in recent decades have been filled with mavericks who won in early states but ended up where most of them started—back on the air as right-wing broadcasters or serving in the U.S. Senate.

It's easy to forget this. Take Iowa, for example. Rick Santorum won its GOP caucuses in 2012 and Mike Huckabee won in 2008. Or New Hampshire, where John McCain won the GOP primary in 2000 and Pat Buchanan won in 1996. Or South Carolina, the third major contest state in 2012, where Newt Gingrich won. All of these candidates won a handful of states in those years, but not the Republican nomination or even the vice-presidential nomination.

Their campaigns fizzled for a mix of reasons. They were too ideological as they moved to more populous urban states. Or they were not embraced by the GOP establishment. Or they ran out of money and weren't organized in the next state as the race continued. Or they stumbled, or their protest vote vanished, or doubts among the public crept in. For different reasons, voters did not think these Republican rebels were ready for prime time—other than returning to their pundit roles or lower elected office.

There are many reasons to heed Walker's words about not putting too much stock in early front-runners—including himself.

The latest polls suggest he might do well in Iowa a year from now—but even that is not a foregone conclusion as its state Republican Party, the New York Times reported Friday, has been undergoing “a purge, recruiting Republican activists to replace the libertarians and Christian conservatives who had taken over the party.” Walker's feet are firmly planted in those two factions.

The beneficiary of any swing to the center in Iowa is likely ex-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. But even if Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad doesn’t sweep the crazies out of the room, the 30,000-40,000 voters he needs to win the state's caucuses are not representative of most Republicans who vote later in the process, especially in larger blue states. Iowa is not where Republican presidential nominations are locked up. That typically comes after a dozen contests, unless a Republican president is seeking re-election.

So what we’re left with in these early states is frequently well-hyped ado that ends up being about nothing. Take Santorum, who in 2012 won in Iowa, lost the next five states in a row, and then won consecutively in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri. He was trounced by Mitt Romney's sweep of big states. Does anybody recall that Santorum won 11 mostly red rural states in 2012?

Santorum beat Mitt Romney in Iowa by 34 votes, followed by Texas Congressman Ron Paul, the libertarian father of 2016’s GOP contender Rand Paul. The fact that 57 percent of Iowa Republicans say they are evangelical Christians goes a long way to explain Santorum's early results. Looking to 2016, Walker checks those same boxes. His father is a preacher. He grew up in Iowa until the third grade. He proudly touts his rural roots.

When it comes to New Hampshire, Walker also could appeal to that state’s flinty rural Republicans, who are cut from a recalcitrant, leave-me-alone cloth. They are the "Live Free or Die" types, as the state's license plate proclaims, but beyond that bit of old New England vanity, they have little in common with Republicans in the state’s populous southeast corner, which is a Boston suburb, where establishment Republicans, like Romney in 2012 and possibly Jeb Bush, prevail.

What might make Walker attractive in these early contests could easily work against him as the primaries progress. His negatives are substantial. He is best known for his union-bashing victories and mockery of thousands of protesters, his anti-abortion and anti-gun control stances. He’s a college dropout and targeted in an active state-level corruption probe, in which several of his top aides have already pleaded guilty to charges.

There’s another important factor that isn’t tracked in polls. Walker isn’t quite like Rand Paul, or Mike Huckabee, or Newt Gingrich, or other candidates who have been perpetually running for president. But his latest speeches have been brimming with grandiosity, bragging about being both the bully (taking on unions) and victim (of death threats by pro-union protesters), which might appeal to libertarian right-wingers and the Koch brothers, but there is an unruly quality about it that isn’t very presidential.

Walker also doesn’t have the experience of the Bush or Clinton clan, who have run repeated presidential campaigns—including losing the nomination (Hillary in 2008) and re-election (George Herbert Walker Bush in 1992). These political dynasties have come to know each important state’s vanities, how to sew up their party’s establishment, how to time their campaigns so they don’t peak too soon. That’s what Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are primarily engaged in today—the backroom work—and why Hillary won’t make any announcements until this summer.

Hillary Clinton knows, as 2008 taught her, that you can lose an early lead. Walker said the same thing on Fox last November. There’s many reasons why progressives should be concerned about Walker's rise—he is the Koch party's waterboy—but not overreact to his new momentum, especially as one of his latest talking points is bragging that he's the guy liberals love to hate.

A final statistic bears out that popularity in a few states is not the same as nationwide appeal. When averaging the results of all the GOP presidential polls taken between November 18 and January 27, RealClearPolitics.com found that Jeb Bush lead with 16.4 percent. Walker was sixth, with only 5.8 percent. The political pendulum might have swung toward Walker in recent polls in early states, but chances are strong it will keep shifting in coming months.

It's still a long way to 2016's first nominating contests, and a long way between the opening votes and choosing the nominee.

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http://www.alternet.org/election-2014/america-moving-rightAmerica Is Moving to the Righthttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/84874132/0/alternet_election2012~America-Is-Moving-to-the-Right

A poll reveals there has been a significant movement away from the Democratic Party.

Partisan winds blowing across America are pushing the country to the political right.

That’s the sobering conclusion of the annual “State of the States” report by Gallup, one of the country’s most reputable pollsters, based on interviewing 177,000 people across the U.S. in 2014. The report concludes that Democrats still have an edge when it comes to presidential elections, but also explains why congressional gridlock endures.

“Since 2008, there has been a significant movement away from the Democratic Party both at the national level and in many states,” Gallup reports. “Democrats still maintain a modest advantage in national partisanship, partly because they have an advantage in some of the most highly populated states such as California, New York and Illinois. At the same time, other large states like Florida and Texas are competitive, with Florida showing a slight Democratic edge and Texas a slight Republican one.”

“The GOP’s inability to dominate in many high population, electoral vote-rich states underscores the challenges it faces in presidential elections based on the winner-take-all electoral vote system,” Gallup explained. “The GOP can overcome that deficit with better turnout to some degree, but also must carry the vast majority of [2014’s 18] competitive states in order to win the [next presidential] election.”

On the other hand, when it comes to state-level politics, the GOP has made sizeable gains since 2008, they reported. In 2008, Gallup said there were 29 “solid Democratic” states, compared to 11 last year. Three of the bluest states—Massachusetts, Maryland and New Jersey—all recently elected or re-elected Republican governors. In contrast, Gallup said there were only four “solid Republican states” in 2008, while last year that figure was 10 states. Of those states, only Montana has a Democratic governor.

“Massachusetts and Maryland rank as the most Democratic states, and Wyoming and Utah are the most Republican, based on the political party identification and leanings of their state residents in 2014,” it said. “The Democratic advantage in Massachusetts and Maryland exceeds 20 percentage points, while Utah and Wyoming show Republican advantages of more than 30 points.”

Looking deeper, the states where voters identified as the most fervent Democrats has not changed very much since Gallup started its partisanship survey seven years ago.

“Nine states have ranked in the top 10 most Democratic every year, including Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island, New York, Vermont, California, Hawaii, Delaware and Illinois,” it said. “New Jersey and Connecticut tied for 10th this year, and one or the other has been in the top 10 every year since 2008.”

In contrast, there has been more variation in the most strident Republican states over time, Gallup said, “with 17 different states appearing at least once since 2008.

“Wyoming and Utah have been the two most Republican states each year, with Idaho placing third in all but two years,” it reported. “In addition to those states, Kansas and Nebraska have ranked in the top 10 every year. Montana, Alabama, North Dakota and Alaska have been in the top 10 all but one year.”

As has long been the case, the bluest states are in the Northeast—from Maryland north to Maine—and along the Pacific Coast. Similarly, the reddest states are between the northern Rocky Mountains and western Plains—from Idaho and Utah eastward to the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas. Alabama and Tennessee are the reddest southern states.

“A state’s partisanship is an indicator of how the state will vote in federal and state elections, as well as the types of policies that will become law in those states,” Gallup said, discussing the “implications” of its findings. “Of course, the figures presented here are based on all state residents, and differences in turnout… can alter the political balance of the state electorate in a given election.”

It’s worth noting that Gallup said there were 18 “competitive” states in 2014, where the partisan balance could tilt either way. That’s a big number and those states, starting with the most Democratic-leaning, are: Minnesota, Florida, West Virginia, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Colorado, Nevada, Louisiana, Ohio, Arizona, Virginia, Iowa, New Hampshire, Kentucky, Georgia, Texas, Missouri and South Carolina.

What does this mean for progressives? It suggests that they will have to work harder at promoting their ideas, agenda and champions as voters appear to be a slightly more centrist or conservative phase. While unpredictable events can upend these kinds of forecasts, Gallup’s partisnship report is a reminder of how political differences both vary and remain fluid across America.

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Thu, 05 Feb 2015 14:59:00 -0800Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet1031442 at http://www.alternet.orgElection 2014Election 2014Gallup 2014 State of The State seriesred and blue states

A poll reveals there has been a significant movement away from the Democratic Party.

Partisan winds blowing across America are pushing the country to the political right.

That’s the sobering conclusion of the annual “State of the States” report by Gallup, one of the country’s most reputable pollsters, based on interviewing 177,000 people across the U.S. in 2014. The report concludes that Democrats still have an edge when it comes to presidential elections, but also explains why congressional gridlock endures.

“Since 2008, there has been a significant movement away from the Democratic Party both at the national level and in many states,” Gallup reports. “Democrats still maintain a modest advantage in national partisanship, partly because they have an advantage in some of the most highly populated states such as California, New York and Illinois. At the same time, other large states like Florida and Texas are competitive, with Florida showing a slight Democratic edge and Texas a slight Republican one.”

“The GOP’s inability to dominate in many high population, electoral vote-rich states underscores the challenges it faces in presidential elections based on the winner-take-all electoral vote system,” Gallup explained. “The GOP can overcome that deficit with better turnout to some degree, but also must carry the vast majority of [2014’s 18] competitive states in order to win the [next presidential] election.”

On the other hand, when it comes to state-level politics, the GOP has made sizeable gains since 2008, they reported. In 2008, Gallup said there were 29 “solid Democratic” states, compared to 11 last year. Three of the bluest states—Massachusetts, Maryland and New Jersey—all recently elected or re-elected Republican governors. In contrast, Gallup said there were only four “solid Republican states” in 2008, while last year that figure was 10 states. Of those states, only Montana has a Democratic governor.

“Massachusetts and Maryland rank as the most Democratic states, and Wyoming and Utah are the most Republican, based on the political party identification and leanings of their state residents in 2014,” it said. “The Democratic advantage in Massachusetts and Maryland exceeds 20 percentage points, while Utah and Wyoming show Republican advantages of more than 30 points.”

Looking deeper, the states where voters identified as the most fervent Democrats has not changed very much since Gallup started its partisanship survey seven years ago.

“Nine states have ranked in the top 10 most Democratic every year, including Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island, New York, Vermont, California, Hawaii, Delaware and Illinois,” it said. “New Jersey and Connecticut tied for 10th this year, and one or the other has been in the top 10 every year since 2008.”

In contrast, there has been more variation in the most strident Republican states over time, Gallup said, “with 17 different states appearing at least once since 2008.

“Wyoming and Utah have been the two most Republican states each year, with Idaho placing third in all but two years,” it reported. “In addition to those states, Kansas and Nebraska have ranked in the top 10 every year. Montana, Alabama, North Dakota and Alaska have been in the top 10 all but one year.”

As has long been the case, the bluest states are in the Northeast—from Maryland north to Maine—and along the Pacific Coast. Similarly, the reddest states are between the northern Rocky Mountains and western Plains—from Idaho and Utah eastward to the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas. Alabama and Tennessee are the reddest southern states.

“A state’s partisanship is an indicator of how the state will vote in federal and state elections, as well as the types of policies that will become law in those states,” Gallup said, discussing the “implications” of its findings. “Of course, the figures presented here are based on all state residents, and differences in turnout… can alter the political balance of the state electorate in a given election.”

It’s worth noting that Gallup said there were 18 “competitive” states in 2014, where the partisan balance could tilt either way. That’s a big number and those states, starting with the most Democratic-leaning, are: Minnesota, Florida, West Virginia, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Colorado, Nevada, Louisiana, Ohio, Arizona, Virginia, Iowa, New Hampshire, Kentucky, Georgia, Texas, Missouri and South Carolina.

What does this mean for progressives? It suggests that they will have to work harder at promoting their ideas, agenda and champions as voters appear to be a slightly more centrist or conservative phase. While unpredictable events can upend these kinds of forecasts, Gallup’s partisnship report is a reminder of how political differences both vary and remain fluid across America.

Walker plays both aggressor and victim in appeal to Koch's and the rest.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is fine-tuning a new stump speech that demonizes unions and protesters, recounts how he and his wife received death threats as he went after labor, says God was preparing him then to run for president now, and notes he has repeatedly won office in a blue state.

Walker appeared to be testing many of these same storylines when speaking at late January’s Iowa Freedom Summit, an event hosted by Rep. Steven King, a Tea Party Republican, and sponsored by various Koch brother-funded groups. Walker repeated them on Monday night in a 30-minute conference call to Iowa Republicans, according to the Des Moines Register:

“One threatened to ‘gut my wife like a deer,’ and another note said that if his wife didn’t stop him, he’d be ‘the first Wisconsin governor ever assassinated,’ he [Walker] said.

“Part of me looks back and thinks that maybe God put me and my family through all this for a purpose – and it wasn’t just to get things done in Wisconsin, and it wasn’t just to win all those elections in a state that normally doesn’t go Republican. Maybe it was to set us to... help get our country on the right track.”

Walker also took swipes at both Jeb Bush, the ex-Florida GOP governor, and at Hillary Clinton, calling them “names from the past.” His anti-union boasts, smears against protesters, playing the victim—when he launched the war against labor—and suggestion that all of this might be a divine plan, are a dismal reminder how far to the right the Republican Party has gone.

Walker’s vain narrative, where he casts himself as a conservative hero, pleased Republicans on the call, according to the Register. Walker said that he “absolutely” could use his playbook in “defeating unions” to “take on liberals in Washington,” control spending and repeal Obamacare, the newspaper said. Walker said, “in the end we won," referring to raising public employee contributions to health plans and his gutting of collective bargaining rights.

Walker’s comments on Monday night echoed what he said at the Iowa Freedom Summit, where he also bragged that his attack on unions sparked the protests that turned into the Occupy Movement—prompting him to “apologize” to Wall Street—as he said that government wasn’t the “enemy,” but public employee unions were.

“I think the biggest challenge for us, or for me personally, were all the death threats and the visits to our home,” he said at the Summit, saying that his wife, parents and sons were threatened. “Time and time again the protesters were trying to intimidate us. But all they did was remind me how important it was to stand up for the people of my state, and remind me why I ran for governor.”

Walker’s message of “go big, go bold, and get the job done” seemed to resonate, the Register said. On Monday’s night conference call, he also said that he was one of the younger party leaders who Mitt Romney referred to when the 2012 nominee announced that he would not run again to make way for new blood.

The salience of Walker’s messages—which also include boasts about being anti-abortion, loosening handgun controls, increasingly policing the polls, cutting state taxes and spending, and opposing Obamacare—is worth watching because it appears to set Walker apart from the GOP’s other 2016 presidential hopefuls. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also brags about his conservative credentials and blue-state victories, but he is not a preacher's son or extreme as Walker. Jeb Bush took similar right-wing stances two decades ago before becoming Florida governor, but is now positioning himself as more of a pro-business moderate.

It may be that Walker’s vanities will ultimately be his undoing as the public pays attention and sees an increasingly smug, self-satisfied and divisive right-winger. But the GOP presidential nominating process plays to a party with an active Tea Party wing, which means that unlike other contenders who lack a record attacking labor and snubbing mass protests (Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, etc.) that Walker has potential.

Indeed, should Florida’s Bush and Wisconsin’s Walker end up on the 2016 ticket, that would pose tough hurdles for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. Both Florida and Wisconsin, with 39 Electoral College votes between them, went for Obama in 2012. So did Iowa, Michigan and Ohio, which all now have GOP governors and another 40 Electoral College votes. Apart from Walker’s red-meat rhetoric, flipping those 2012 Obama states will surely be on GOP minds.

Walker plays both aggressor and victim in appeal to Koch's and the rest.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is fine-tuning a new stump speech that demonizes unions and protesters, recounts how he and his wife received death threats as he went after labor, says God was preparing him then to run for president now, and notes he has repeatedly won office in a blue state.

Walker appeared to be testing many of these same storylines when speaking at late January’s Iowa Freedom Summit, an event hosted by Rep. Steven King, a Tea Party Republican, and sponsored by various Koch brother-funded groups. Walker repeated them on Monday night in a 30-minute conference call to Iowa Republicans, according to the Des Moines Register:

“One threatened to ‘gut my wife like a deer,’ and another note said that if his wife didn’t stop him, he’d be ‘the first Wisconsin governor ever assassinated,’ he [Walker] said.

“Part of me looks back and thinks that maybe God put me and my family through all this for a purpose – and it wasn’t just to get things done in Wisconsin, and it wasn’t just to win all those elections in a state that normally doesn’t go Republican. Maybe it was to set us to... help get our country on the right track.”

Walker also took swipes at both Jeb Bush, the ex-Florida GOP governor, and at Hillary Clinton, calling them “names from the past.” His anti-union boasts, smears against protesters, playing the victim—when he launched the war against labor—and suggestion that all of this might be a divine plan, are a dismal reminder how far to the right the Republican Party has gone.

Walker’s vain narrative, where he casts himself as a conservative hero, pleased Republicans on the call, according to the Register. Walker said that he “absolutely” could use his playbook in “defeating unions” to “take on liberals in Washington,” control spending and repeal Obamacare, the newspaper said. Walker said, “in the end we won," referring to raising public employee contributions to health plans and his gutting of collective bargaining rights.

Walker’s comments on Monday night echoed what he said at the Iowa Freedom Summit, where he also bragged that his attack on unions sparked the protests that turned into the Occupy Movement—prompting him to “apologize” to Wall Street—as he said that government wasn’t the “enemy,” but public employee unions were.

“I think the biggest challenge for us, or for me personally, were all the death threats and the visits to our home,” he said at the Summit, saying that his wife, parents and sons were threatened. “Time and time again the protesters were trying to intimidate us. But all they did was remind me how important it was to stand up for the people of my state, and remind me why I ran for governor.”

Walker’s message of “go big, go bold, and get the job done” seemed to resonate, the Register said. On Monday’s night conference call, he also said that he was one of the younger party leaders who Mitt Romney referred to when the 2012 nominee announced that he would not run again to make way for new blood.

The salience of Walker’s messages—which also include boasts about being anti-abortion, loosening handgun controls, increasingly policing the polls, cutting state taxes and spending, and opposing Obamacare—is worth watching because it appears to set Walker apart from the GOP’s other 2016 presidential hopefuls. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also brags about his conservative credentials and blue-state victories, but he is not a preacher's son or extreme as Walker. Jeb Bush took similar right-wing stances two decades ago before becoming Florida governor, but is now positioning himself as more of a pro-business moderate.

It may be that Walker’s vanities will ultimately be his undoing as the public pays attention and sees an increasingly smug, self-satisfied and divisive right-winger. But the GOP presidential nominating process plays to a party with an active Tea Party wing, which means that unlike other contenders who lack a record attacking labor and snubbing mass protests (Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, etc.) that Walker has potential.

Indeed, should Florida’s Bush and Wisconsin’s Walker end up on the 2016 ticket, that would pose tough hurdles for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. Both Florida and Wisconsin, with 39 Electoral College votes between them, went for Obama in 2012. So did Iowa, Michigan and Ohio, which all now have GOP governors and another 40 Electoral College votes. Apart from Walker’s red-meat rhetoric, flipping those 2012 Obama states will surely be on GOP minds.

A lot of misinformation is spread by vaccination critics, here’s what to look out for.

The measles outbreak and recent statements by politicians like Rand Paul and Chris Christie have reignited the debate on childhood vaccinations. However, there is very little to debate; vaccinations are proven to protect public health. Still, this isn’t stopping vaccination critics from spouting misinformation. Here are nine examples.

1. Vaccines cause ‘profound mental disorders.’ This wild conspiracy theory has been circulating before Sen. Rand Paul appeared on CNBC to double down on the message. Previously, it was promoted by Michele Bachmann during her quixotic quest for the White House in 2012.

After lambasting then Gov. Rick Perry during a presidential debate for mandating vaccinations in Texas, Bachmann took to the airwaves to continue the attack. Bachmann claimed that young girls who get the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine could suffer from permanent brain damage.

“There’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine,” Bachmann said on Fox News. “She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result. There are very dangerous consequences.”

Bachmann was unable to produce the name of the woman who spoke to her and nobody has since come forward. There are no known cases of women or girls who have a sudden onset of profound mental disabilities as a result of the HPV vaccination.

2. Vaccines cause autism. This crazy talk of “profound mental disorders” and “mental retardation” likely comes from the thoroughly debunked pet theory of anti-vaxxers that there is a link between immunization and autism, a neurological condition. However, this link has been thoroughly discredited by countless medical studies. In 1998, a British surgeon named Andrew Wakefield published an article about a possible link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism based on his observations of only 12 children. Wakefield’s study has since been debunked, and he has since lost his license to practice medicine in Great Britain over evidence of professional misconduct associated with the study.

Meanwhile, no other scientific study has been able to replicate Wakefield’s findings, and many of these studies involve millions of children, not just 12.

3. Childhood vaccinations contain mercury. A little more than a decade ago, most childhood vaccinations contained a preservative called thimerosal, which can break down to create the ethylmercury compound in the body. While science knows that methylmercury is extremely toxic, the health effects of ethylmercury weren’t as well documented, and since then numerous peer-reviewed medical studies have failed to demonstrate any association between the levels of thimerosal children used to receive in vaccines and any neurological or developmental disorder. Keep in mind that the body uses ethylmercury differently than methylmercury; ethylmercury breaks down and clears the body much more quickly than does methylmercury. Therefore, low-level exposures from vaccines are not the same as long-term environmental methylmercury exposure.

However, after hearing concerns over parents about the presence of thimerosal in vaccines, the pharmaceutical industry voluntarily phased out thimerosal as a preservative in childhood vaccinations. Today it is only used in a limited amount of influenza vaccinations.

4. Mandating vaccines is government overreach. Another common theme in Rand Paul’s fevered delusion of American dystopia: the Kentucky Senator reinforced this theme in his CNBC interview saying that “the state doesn’t own the children. Parents own the children.” This sentiment was also echoed by Gov. Chris Christie this week.

Anti-vaxxers may claim that it is not the job of the government to mandate vaccinations, but this libertarian philosophy falls apart when it runs into public health policy.

For starters, children aren’t chattel to be “owned” by parents and they shouldn’t be made victims of their parents’ vaccination paranoia. Yet, anti-vaxxers claim that the children should be subjected to the whims of their parents, no matter how deluded they might be. Furthermore, not vaccinating goes well beyond a parenting issue, it is a critical public health issue. When people do not vaccinate their children, it weakens the herd immunity needed to keep potentially deadly diseases like the measles and pertussis from infants too young to be vaccinated and those with compromised immune systems.

Vaccine denialism has already shown to have a negative effect on public health in some regional pockets, and it’s leaving those communities open to outbreaks. In 2013, researchers confirmed that a 2010 whooping cough outbreak in California—the worst in the U.S. in more than 50 years—was spread primarily by the children of parents who received non-medical exemptions for school vaccinations from the state. The study showed that the outbreak was found exclusively in clusters where children were not vaccinated. Many infants who were too young to be immunized were hospitalized with pertussis as a result, ten of them died.

5. The science behind vaccines is disputable. Vaccines are roundly misunderstood. Critics claim that science doesn’t know how or if they work, and others claim that people can actually get sick from vaccinations. Others say that they are ineffective.

In reality, there’s a wealth of evidence showing that vaccines have stopped plagues and epidemics in the past. Take both smallpox and polio, which both killed and crippled substantial portions of of Western populations before vaccinations were introduced. Also, the rate of measles steadily dropped in the two decades following 1963, the year vaccination was first widely introduced.

6. Vaccines cause the diseases. Few childhood vaccinations contain a live version of a virus and it is impossible to get a disease from a dead virus. Only those immunizations made from weakened, or attenuated, live viruses may produce mild symptoms. Those include the chicken pox and measles-mumps-rubella vaccines (oral polio vaccines with a weakened virus were discontinued in 2000). It is possible, but unlikely, that a child may develop a much milder form of one of these diseases after receiving one of these vaccinations. However, children with weakened immune systems and those being treated for diseases like cancer, should still avoid vaccines that contain attenuated viruses.

7. Doctors get paid by pharmaceutical companies to give vaccinations. Anti-vaxxers argue that the pharmaceutical industry and doctors are getting rich by giving children vaccinations. Some even claim that doctors are given bonuses for each vaccination they give. It’s hard to argue with such a cynical accusation, but many vaccines are created by research facilities and given to pharmaceutical companies to produce, which do so at low margins (MMR vaccinations cost less than $1 to produce). Furthermore, there are nearly 60,000 pediatricians in the U.S., so you would think that one of them would have a change of heart or somebody associated to one of them would have exposed such a nefarious plot by now. But it hasn’t happened.

8. Society really doesn’t need vaccinations. Most vaccine critics say that people can build up natural immunities to diseases that are just as effective as vaccinations. While it’s true that we can build up immunity, there are only two ways to be effectively immunized from a disease, either having the disease or being vaccinated, and having the disease is a risky proposition. So, yes, children who have had the measles are now immune, but a large percentage of those children will be hospitalized and many will suffer from ear infections and some from meningitis as a result.

Vaccine critics also say that many childhood diseases were being wiped out because of better sanitation, not vaccinations. And while improved health care, better nutrition, and modern socioeconomics play a positive role in public health, they really only increase the survival rate of diseases, they don’t prevent them.

The drastic drop in measles happened long after western civilizations were benefiting from better health care, nutrition and sanitation. It only happened when the vaccination was first widely given to children. Further, as sanitation has improved significantly even in the last three decades, shouldn’t we be seeing a further drop in the incidence of diseases like pertussis and the measles today instead of a marked increase? The only thing that is changed in recent years is a decrease in childhood vaccinations.

9. Measles is a harmless disease. Measles is one of the most infectious airborne diseases known to man; a single infected person on an airplane or in a crowded room can easily spread the disease to nearly every other person present who hasn't been vaccinated. But vaccine critics make the claim that measles is a common and benign childhood disease, but that claim is far from the truth. For every 1,000 cases, it is estimated that between one and two people will be killed by it. Only recently, as many as 750,000 people, mostly children in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, lost their life to measles in a single year. And unlike Ebola, which has not killed nearly as many people as measles, these deaths are entirely preventable.

A lot of misinformation is spread by vaccination critics, here’s what to look out for.

The measles outbreak and recent statements by politicians like Rand Paul and Chris Christie have reignited the debate on childhood vaccinations. However, there is very little to debate; vaccinations are proven to protect public health. Still, this isn’t stopping vaccination critics from spouting misinformation. Here are nine examples.

1. Vaccines cause ‘profound mental disorders.’ This wild conspiracy theory has been circulating before Sen. Rand Paul appeared on CNBC to double down on the message. Previously, it was promoted by Michele Bachmann during her quixotic quest for the White House in 2012.

After lambasting then Gov. Rick Perry during a presidential debate for mandating vaccinations in Texas, Bachmann took to the airwaves to continue the attack. Bachmann claimed that young girls who get the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine could suffer from permanent brain damage.

“There’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine,” Bachmann said on Fox News. “She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result. There are very dangerous consequences.”

Bachmann was unable to produce the name of the woman who spoke to her and nobody has since come forward. There are no known cases of women or girls who have a sudden onset of profound mental disabilities as a result of the HPV vaccination.

2. Vaccines cause autism. This crazy talk of “profound mental disorders” and “mental retardation” likely comes from the thoroughly debunked pet theory of anti-vaxxers that there is a link between immunization and autism, a neurological condition. However, this link has been thoroughly discredited by countless medical studies. In 1998, a British surgeon named Andrew Wakefield published an article about a possible link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism based on his observations of only 12 children. Wakefield’s study has since been debunked, and he has since lost his license to practice medicine in Great Britain over evidence of professional misconduct associated with the study.

Meanwhile, no other scientific study has been able to replicate Wakefield’s findings, and many of these studies involve millions of children, not just 12.

3. Childhood vaccinations contain mercury. A little more than a decade ago, most childhood vaccinations contained a preservative called thimerosal, which can break down to create the ethylmercury compound in the body. While science knows that methylmercury is extremely toxic, the health effects of ethylmercury weren’t as well documented, and since then numerous peer-reviewed medical studies have failed to demonstrate any association between the levels of thimerosal children used to receive in vaccines and any neurological or developmental disorder. Keep in mind that the body uses ethylmercury differently than methylmercury; ethylmercury breaks down and clears the body much more quickly than does methylmercury. Therefore, low-level exposures from vaccines are not the same as long-term environmental methylmercury exposure.

However, after hearing concerns over parents about the presence of thimerosal in vaccines, the pharmaceutical industry voluntarily phased out thimerosal as a preservative in childhood vaccinations. Today it is only used in a limited amount of influenza vaccinations.

4. Mandating vaccines is government overreach. Another common theme in Rand Paul’s fevered delusion of American dystopia: the Kentucky Senator reinforced this theme in his CNBC interview saying that “the state doesn’t own the children. Parents own the children.” This sentiment was also echoed by Gov. Chris Christie this week.

Anti-vaxxers may claim that it is not the job of the government to mandate vaccinations, but this libertarian philosophy falls apart when it runs into public health policy.

For starters, children aren’t chattel to be “owned” by parents and they shouldn’t be made victims of their parents’ vaccination paranoia. Yet, anti-vaxxers claim that the children should be subjected to the whims of their parents, no matter how deluded they might be. Furthermore, not vaccinating goes well beyond a parenting issue, it is a critical public health issue. When people do not vaccinate their children, it weakens the herd immunity needed to keep potentially deadly diseases like the measles and pertussis from infants too young to be vaccinated and those with compromised immune systems.

Vaccine denialism has already shown to have a negative effect on public health in some regional pockets, and it’s leaving those communities open to outbreaks. In 2013, researchers confirmed that a 2010 whooping cough outbreak in California—the worst in the U.S. in more than 50 years—was spread primarily by the children of parents who received non-medical exemptions for school vaccinations from the state. The study showed that the outbreak was found exclusively in clusters where children were not vaccinated. Many infants who were too young to be immunized were hospitalized with pertussis as a result, ten of them died.

5. The science behind vaccines is disputable. Vaccines are roundly misunderstood. Critics claim that science doesn’t know how or if they work, and others claim that people can actually get sick from vaccinations. Others say that they are ineffective.

In reality, there’s a wealth of evidence showing that vaccines have stopped plagues and epidemics in the past. Take both smallpox and polio, which both killed and crippled substantial portions of of Western populations before vaccinations were introduced. Also, the rate of measles steadily dropped in the two decades following 1963, the year vaccination was first widely introduced.

6. Vaccines cause the diseases. Few childhood vaccinations contain a live version of a virus and it is impossible to get a disease from a dead virus. Only those immunizations made from weakened, or attenuated, live viruses may produce mild symptoms. Those include the chicken pox and measles-mumps-rubella vaccines (oral polio vaccines with a weakened virus were discontinued in 2000). It is possible, but unlikely, that a child may develop a much milder form of one of these diseases after receiving one of these vaccinations. However, children with weakened immune systems and those being treated for diseases like cancer, should still avoid vaccines that contain attenuated viruses.

7. Doctors get paid by pharmaceutical companies to give vaccinations. Anti-vaxxers argue that the pharmaceutical industry and doctors are getting rich by giving children vaccinations. Some even claim that doctors are given bonuses for each vaccination they give. It’s hard to argue with such a cynical accusation, but many vaccines are created by research facilities and given to pharmaceutical companies to produce, which do so at low margins (MMR vaccinations cost less than $1 to produce). Furthermore, there are nearly 60,000 pediatricians in the U.S., so you would think that one of them would have a change of heart or somebody associated to one of them would have exposed such a nefarious plot by now. But it hasn’t happened.

8. Society really doesn’t need vaccinations. Most vaccine critics say that people can build up natural immunities to diseases that are just as effective as vaccinations. While it’s true that we can build up immunity, there are only two ways to be effectively immunized from a disease, either having the disease or being vaccinated, and having the disease is a risky proposition. So, yes, children who have had the measles are now immune, but a large percentage of those children will be hospitalized and many will suffer from ear infections and some from meningitis as a result.

Vaccine critics also say that many childhood diseases were being wiped out because of better sanitation, not vaccinations. And while improved health care, better nutrition, and modern socioeconomics play a positive role in public health, they really only increase the survival rate of diseases, they don’t prevent them.

The drastic drop in measles happened long after western civilizations were benefiting from better health care, nutrition and sanitation. It only happened when the vaccination was first widely given to children. Further, as sanitation has improved significantly even in the last three decades, shouldn’t we be seeing a further drop in the incidence of diseases like pertussis and the measles today instead of a marked increase? The only thing that is changed in recent years is a decrease in childhood vaccinations.

9. Measles is a harmless disease. Measles is one of the most infectious airborne diseases known to man; a single infected person on an airplane or in a crowded room can easily spread the disease to nearly every other person present who hasn't been vaccinated. But vaccine critics make the claim that measles is a common and benign childhood disease, but that claim is far from the truth. For every 1,000 cases, it is estimated that between one and two people will be killed by it. Only recently, as many as 750,000 people, mostly children in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, lost their life to measles in a single year. And unlike Ebola, which has not killed nearly as many people as measles, these deaths are entirely preventable.

The same guy who quarantined the "ebola nurse" says parents should have a choice about vaccines.

Speaking Monday while traveling overseas, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie tried to give his presidential campaign among Republican evangelicals a shot in the arm by saying that parents should have a choice in vaccinating their children. But Christie may have put his foot in his mouth instead.

Christie, while touring a biomedical complex in the U.K. during a trade visit—another effort to boost his presidential profile—said that parents should have a “choice” in vaccinating their children, saying that the government’s requirement that children who attend public schools be immunized may be overreaching.

“It’s much more important, I think, what you think as a parent than what you think as a public official,” he said. “I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that’s the balance that the government has to decide.”

Christie’s comments provoked quick criticism. They come against a backdrop of ongoing outbreaks of measles in 14 states—because small numbers of parents in many states are not vaccinating their kids. That has prompted criticism by the medical community and a growing backlash against vaccine opponents. This weekend, President Obama urged parents to “get your kids vaccinated.”

Christie comments also appear to contradict his order last fall to quarantine a nurse who had been exposed to Ebola, when he defended that decision as better-safe-than-sorry. That observation was one of many on Twitter, where many writers criticized the vaccine comments.

Christie’s staff quickly recalibrated his remarks, issuing a statement: “The governor believes vaccines are an important public health protection and with a disease like measles there is no question kids should be vaccinated. At the same time, different states require different degrees of vaccination, which is why he was calling for balance in which ones government should mandate.”

What’s going on here is Christie is trying to burnish his credentials among evangelical Republican voters in the early GOP primary and caucus States. In late January, when he appeared at the Iowa Freedom Summit, he touted his pro-life credentials as a blue-state governor. That was before Mitt Romney withdrew from the 2016 Republican field, which boosts Christie’s profile—and prompts this kind of political pandering.

The issue of vaccine choice fits under a larger umbrella in the evangelical pantheon, where conservative Christians believe their lifestyles are under attack by secular America. As a result, there is an ongoing push to obtain separate legal rights—such exemptions from vaccine laws, public funds for home schooling and charter schools, exemption from including contraception in employee health plans under Obamacare, and most recently, state-level religious freedom bills to allow discrimination against the LGBT community—essentially protecting the choice not to interact with LGBT individuals in commerce.

There are approximately 400,000 Republicans who will be participating in Iowa 2016 Caucuses. Donna Holman, Iowa state chair of Vaccine Liberation, a nationwide anti-vaccine group, said Christie’s remarks were helpful. “The more people who know about it the better,” she said. “Some people put faith and trust in their medical doctors, rather than put faith and trust in God.”

“Seventy-five hundred people in Iowa have chosen not to vaccinate their children,” Holman said. “There are a lot of other people who don’t have that choice, because they want to send their children to public school… There are some [vaccine] waivers in the laws, but they are hard to get.”

Holman described why she was involved in this issue, which reveals a lot about the slice of the GOP that Christie—and no doubt other Republican presidential hopefuls—are pandering to.

“I started protesting vaccines in 1972 when I heard they were using living cells from aborted babies [to make vaccines]… and growing the viruses in their lung cells,” she said. “I’ve been trying to educate people about that ever since.”

The same guy who quarantined the "ebola nurse" says parents should have a choice about vaccines.

Speaking Monday while traveling overseas, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie tried to give his presidential campaign among Republican evangelicals a shot in the arm by saying that parents should have a choice in vaccinating their children. But Christie may have put his foot in his mouth instead.

Christie, while touring a biomedical complex in the U.K. during a trade visit—another effort to boost his presidential profile—said that parents should have a “choice” in vaccinating their children, saying that the government’s requirement that children who attend public schools be immunized may be overreaching.

“It’s much more important, I think, what you think as a parent than what you think as a public official,” he said. “I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that’s the balance that the government has to decide.”

Christie’s comments provoked quick criticism. They come against a backdrop of ongoing outbreaks of measles in 14 states—because small numbers of parents in many states are not vaccinating their kids. That has prompted criticism by the medical community and a growing backlash against vaccine opponents. This weekend, President Obama urged parents to “get your kids vaccinated.”

Christie comments also appear to contradict his order last fall to quarantine a nurse who had been exposed to Ebola, when he defended that decision as better-safe-than-sorry. That observation was one of many on Twitter, where many writers criticized the vaccine comments.

Christie’s staff quickly recalibrated his remarks, issuing a statement: “The governor believes vaccines are an important public health protection and with a disease like measles there is no question kids should be vaccinated. At the same time, different states require different degrees of vaccination, which is why he was calling for balance in which ones government should mandate.”

What’s going on here is Christie is trying to burnish his credentials among evangelical Republican voters in the early GOP primary and caucus States. In late January, when he appeared at the Iowa Freedom Summit, he touted his pro-life credentials as a blue-state governor. That was before Mitt Romney withdrew from the 2016 Republican field, which boosts Christie’s profile—and prompts this kind of political pandering.

The issue of vaccine choice fits under a larger umbrella in the evangelical pantheon, where conservative Christians believe their lifestyles are under attack by secular America. As a result, there is an ongoing push to obtain separate legal rights—such exemptions from vaccine laws, public funds for home schooling and charter schools, exemption from including contraception in employee health plans under Obamacare, and most recently, state-level religious freedom bills to allow discrimination against the LGBT community—essentially protecting the choice not to interact with LGBT individuals in commerce.

There are approximately 400,000 Republicans who will be participating in Iowa 2016 Caucuses. Donna Holman, Iowa state chair of Vaccine Liberation, a nationwide anti-vaccine group, said Christie’s remarks were helpful. “The more people who know about it the better,” she said. “Some people put faith and trust in their medical doctors, rather than put faith and trust in God.”

“Seventy-five hundred people in Iowa have chosen not to vaccinate their children,” Holman said. “There are a lot of other people who don’t have that choice, because they want to send their children to public school… There are some [vaccine] waivers in the laws, but they are hard to get.”

Holman described why she was involved in this issue, which reveals a lot about the slice of the GOP that Christie—and no doubt other Republican presidential hopefuls—are pandering to.

“I started protesting vaccines in 1972 when I heard they were using living cells from aborted babies [to make vaccines]… and growing the viruses in their lung cells,” she said. “I’ve been trying to educate people about that ever since.”